by Jonell Galloway
When you learn French in school, you learn how to say “the past recaptured,” “finding time again,” and other such useful Proustian phrases, but you don’t learn how real people talk today, as in, “I would like a dozen of those luscious dark chocolate religieuses, please.” School vocabulary is often formal and outdated, and omits teaching you useful, everyday phrases.
When I arrived in France, people would kindly smile at my textbook phrases. I quickly caught on that when they smiled, it was best to just ask them how they would say it, in plain French, because I sounded like Proust, which makes an ordinary French person want to go to sleep.
This applied in particular to the most ordinary, commonplace words. I had read Flaubert, Maupassant and Proust, but sometimes didn’t know the words for the simplest objects.
My best example is café au lait. For some reason unbeknownst to me, when you order café au lait in a café in France, you call it café crème. There is no logic in this, because it doesn’t contain an ounce of cream. It is made with steamed milk, just like the café au lait you make at home. It’s the same thing, but you call it by another name, depending on the context.
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