Suck Marine Sandwich, or How to Butcher a Language
I lived in France for three years. I worked for a French company. Learning French was required to be successful, more so in life than in the business, because it was difficult at that time to live in France and not speak French.
The French language was a challenge and I loved learning and trying to speak. Unfortunately I started learning French at the age of 40 and that was not optimal. At the age of 40 your brain is not as receptive to learning new languages as it is in younger years.
As many of you are saying to yourselves… “and, not being too smart doesn’t help any”.
I made many mistakes. Normally they were just corrected or overlooked by the Native French speaker and we just “moved on”.
However there were times when the mistake was so egregious and shocking that it could not be overlooked.
Here are some examples…
#1 Suck Marine Sandwich
When I moved home (back to America) I was visiting French speaking Canada and I went to lunch with come colleagues. The menu was of course in French and everyone ordered. I was the last to order and I did so assured that my order was correct, complete and could be well understood.
As soon as I looked up from my menu my colleagues looked horrified. They started sputtering and coughing. I think they wanted to laugh but were afraid to insult me by doing so.
They looked at the waitress. They had big puppy dog eyes that said, “We are SOOO sorry”. Experts say communication is 80 percent body language and facial expression; and these two were telling the waitress how sorry they were by their expressions.
After coughing and choking and trying not to laugh they finally scraped together enough composure to ask, “Do you know what you said”.
I said, “Yes, I ordered a submarine sandwich”.
“No”, what you said was, “I want a suck marine sandwich’”.
So then we all laughed. Except the waitress who had retreated to the back of the restaurant. We laughed some more and the day continued.
And I had a great sandwich. It certainly didn’t suck.
#2 Because She’s in heat
The company for which I worked in France had a language department. Primarily the department existed to teach English to French speaking people. Obviously in my case the goal was to teach French to a hopeless English speaker.
One of the main rules for a student was that you could NEVER speak English. They would literally yell at you if you ever slipped up and spoke English.
As you might imagine the teachers were, out of necessity, very patient.
One day my female teacher was going through an exercise with me that was apparently very boring to her; or she’d had a late night and just needed to rest during my lesson. So she played a cassette tape of a French boss interviewing people for a job. She’d ask in a lazy, half hearted way if I understood this or that about the conversation.
Then She’d play a few minutes more and in a flat tone as if sleep were overtaking her, ask me a question to see if I could deduce something from the French.
In the story, after the boss had interviewed all these people, my teacher asked me (in French of course) which of these people would I hire?
I said the second woman because she seemed so warm to me.
The teacher sat bolt upright in her chair. Her sleepy eyes flew wide open. She began to cough and sputter. She choked on her laughter.
Not a polite giggle so as to not make the student feel badly, but one of those laughs that starts and grows uncontrollable. A laugh the takes over the person and becomes an entity of its own.
She was a person possessed.
She couldn’t stop laughing.
I wondered if someone would come to the door to offer medical aid.
Her episode gave me some time to think about what I might have said.
When my teacher regained her sanity she asked me, “Do you know that you said? You said that you would hire her because she is in heat?”
I calmly replied, “Yes, and that is what I intended to say.”
#3 I’m pregnant
I had a French friend who would take me out to eat in restaurants from time to time. The goal of these outings was to show me how “normal” French people eat when they go out. The restaurants were “off the beaten path”.
On one occasion at the end of the meal the waiter came and asked if I was finished with my dish and I said in French, “I am full”, which is something us lower middle class people in America would typically say (in English).
My host immediately became aghast. It was obvious that I had embarrassed them and made a big mistake.
Again there was that look of apology from the host to the waiter which said, “My guest is an idiot, I’m so sorry”.
They told me that to say one “was full” that was idiomatic for saying “I’m pregnant”.
I don’t know how idioms come into being. Most make some sense. That one makes none (well very little) to me.
#4 I’m dead
Same scenario as above, same everything except this time I said to the waiter at the end of the meal: “I’m finished”.
Which in France I now know means…
“I’m dead”.
So I loved learning the French language, it was lots of fun and it was necessary to get along in that country at that time.
In conclusion, I no longer have the opportunity to butcher the French language and I’ve retreated to butchering the English language.