Humor
How To Mess Up The French Language In Paris
North American French Is Not Proper French
Pancakes And Nutella
To us, the city smelled like pancakes and nutella.
Delicious.
It was our first trip away together, and we decided to make it a 2 day trip to Paris.
This wasn’t a big deal when you worked for an airline and could get cheap flights.
“Let’s get some crepes with ice cream”, Karen said, as we wandered the streets for the first time. In Canada, Karen loved crepes with ice cream, and we often went to a dessert place called “Demitri’s”, for some crepes with nutella, bananas and ice cream.
And so we found a quaint coffee shop along the way and went inside.
It’s All Greek To Me
The menus were in French, of course.
The waiters only spoke French too.
This would be interesting.
Our Grade 9 French skills were lacking.
“How do we ask for it?”, Karen whispered to me.
At that time, we didn’t have Google on our phones. We just had to try and remember things.
Like the cavemen did.
à la mode = ice cream
“Just say ‘crepes, à la mode, s’il vous plais’ ”, I said, feeling very proud of myself for that bit of knowledge. “Like, when we ask for apple pie à la mode.”
When the waiter came by, she did just that.
“Crepes à la mode, s’il vous plais”, Karen said boldly.
“à la mode?”, he repeated, seemingly confused.
“Oui, à la mode”, she said.
He said something long and complicated in French.
We stared at him, in English.
It appeared that he didn’t know what “à la mode” meant.
“avec Ice Cream”, I interjected.
It didn’t improve things.
He brought his colleague, who spoke a little bit of English.
“Could we have some crepes with ice cream?”, Karen said to the second guy, giving up the charade completely.
No luck.
Karen and I looked at each other.
What were we missing?
Fashionable Crepes
Only last night, 14 years later, we found out why he didn’t understand.
My brother in law Sean was over, with his fiancee Tanya, and we were talking about that trip.
We couldn’t figure out why the waiters didn’t understand that we wanted ice cream.
“à la mode means ice cream, right?”, I said.
Tanya said “Actually ‘crème glacée’ means ice cream”.
“It does?”, I replied.
“Then what does à la mode mean?”
I googled “à la mode”.
It turns out that Paris French is different from North American French slang.
In proper French, “à la mode” means “in fashion”.
We had been asking for Crepes…in fashion.
Stylish crepes.
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