Last year I was studying French with The Open University and I occasionally wandered into an online forum for discussing tricky questions about translation and grammar etc.
One day I read a very amusing story from an English woman who had a French husband. The woman could speak French reasonably well but was not completely fluent.
They had invited some French friends over to dinner. Whilst at the table one of the guests asked the woman what she had been doing earlier in the day. The woman explained that because her mother had recently died, she had been feeling quite down when she got up in the morning. She went onto explain that she had listened to some music and then stroked her cat for a while and that helped her to feel better and ready to face the day.
The French word for 'cat' is 'le chat'. It is a masculine word. However, the woman had a female cat and therefore she thought she ought to use 'la chatte' instead.
Some of you may be ahead of me by now.
'La chatte' in French is not generally used for a female cat, but it is used for a certain part of a woman's anatomy which is also referred to with a feline term in English sometimes. :-)
The woman went on to tell us that her husband did not tell her about the little mistake she had made until the guests had left when she almost died with embarrassment. All the guests had apparently sat biting their lips and staring at each other wide eyed but none had corrected her.
Share on Facebook
No comments:
Post a Comment