I suppose I should say, Wednesday night I got arrêtéed.
Have any of you had ridiculous language follies? Please tell me about them :)
Wednesday night I went out with my best friend to eat kebabs. You know all about the tradition; we just can't let it slide. Afterwards we decided to drink a demi-pêche, then another, and at some point we ended up at the discothèque where we danced the night away. We walked back to our houses together, then split at the crossroads. I started walking towards my house when a bright purple car with 5 guys in it pulled up next to me and stopped.
They said, "Stop walking." I kept walking--there was no way I was stopping for these guys. There were five of them, in a purple car, wearing street clothes. No. They pulled a little further in front of me and said, "Really, stop, we're the police." I gave them a look like, are you kidding me? and kept walking. The guy in the passenger side said, "No, really, see?" and put a siren on top of the car.
Ok, ok, I believe you!
They asked me what I was celebrating (ummmmm, I'm just walking to my house? Disregard the fact that it's 3 a.m.) then asked me how old I am. When I said 20, the passenger grabbed the siren off the roof, the driver pulled a U-turn in the middle of the road, and sped away. So bizarre. I told Tall Man that "j'était arrêtée par le flic." Literally, this means "I was stopped by the police," but "arrêter" also means to arrest. I'm sure he slept poorly, tossing and turning, thinking about his helpless, inept American girlfriend attempting to weasel her way out of French jail :P Instead, I was sleeping like a baby, even more so because I didn't have class until 11 the next day.
I've been running into some very curious pronunciation problems lately. Like, my host family stares at me--absolutely stares--when I talk about the prices of things. For instance, I told them how expensive it was to live in England, how cheap Ryan Air costs in terms of other airlines. They always just kinda half smile and give a shallow nod. At first I thought, perhaps they think I'm just money-obsessed? ...but me being a student is reason enough to be money-conscious! Then I realized: I had been saying "c'est cher" instead of "ça coute cher." The first one actually means "this is very dear to me." No wonder.
Another one I have run into, particularly in the month of November, is the question of wetness. It rains a lot. Therefore, I want to say, "My coat is wet. I will leave it on the radiator." The problem with this is, the word for wet is "mouillé." The word my American tongue forms is something like "moe-eh-yuh."
The word I am saying actually means bone marrow.
In case you were wondering, I just left my bone marrow on the radiator.
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