Oh my word!

Late spring 1976, a warm day in the final week of my first year at big school. Halcyon days. That never-to-be-forgotten summer was long, hot, and wonderful. I swam in the Tay, picked strawberries in Angus fields, and was sunburned so often I permanently smelled of calamine lotion.

It was an interminable afternoon in double French, though. The last thing I felt like doing was a test.

To enliven proceedings my chum Leslie (always nicknamed Fritz) said: “I bet I can get a lower mark than you can!”

Never one to shirk a challenge, I set out to not just fail but fail spectacularly. I didn’t even spell my name correctly. I made up an entirely new language: Question: “What is the French word for cat?” My answer: “mogapawpaw”. And so on.

This, Fritz and I reckoned, was a hilarious caper. How daring we young rebels were!

However, upon returning to school to begin second year we discovered the test’s purpose had been to determine which class we would join to carry on our French studies.

I had been pretty good at the parley vous throughout first year and should have been in Group 1 with the clever kids. But Fritz and I were placed in Group 7 with the kids who couldn’t speak English, never mind French.

We weren’t even given French lessons. We had to help the janitor empty the playground bins (such measures were allowed in schools in those times). Nowadays this treatment of children would be the subject of a Channel 4 investigative documentary.

I learned two valuable lessons from this sorry episode. 1. Hold your nose when emptying bins. 2. Daft youthful decisions can affect your whole life.

I never did learn French and have gaps in my understanding of commonly-used terms in this country. For instance, I have no idea what “soup du jour” is. Is a “du jour” like a tomato?

An a la carte meal, disappointingly, doesn’t come on a cart. And you can keep your hors d’oeuvres, I wouldn’t eat any part of a horse.

Seemingly, if an “au pair” is hired there is only one of them. Despite the name, most “femme fatales” aren’t fat. And I’ve never encountered a maître d’ who was even slightly matey (bunch of snobs!).

I must end by saying that I’m not entirely distraught at my foreign language ignorance. I find most French words and phrases inserted raw into English to be ridiculously pretentious. I try to avoid using them.

If a restaurant, even a hoity-toity one, is to serve a soup of the day why not just call it “soup of the day”?

STEVE FINAN IN DEFENCE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE