Being Very Wrong About French Things (Part Deux)

A roster of silly linguistic humblings—until the vet taught me one phrase I can’t shake.

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Not long after I arrived in Paris, I went to a massive appliance store called Darty to buy a milk frother to go with my mini Nespresso machine. (European me makes cappuccinos at home!)

I didn’t know the actual word for milk frother, so I did what I often do when I am stuck without a cell signal: I improvised and came up with something I thought was close enough to the French word for “frother.”

However, as soon as I asked Delphine, a besmocked sales clerk, for a frother using my special word, I knew something had gone very wrong. It was like I’d slapped her: We do not carry THAT sort of thing HERE.

This was the moment to walk the two retail miles to where I could use my phone to look up the word.

But did I do that?

No. I persisted, like a Roomba trapped in a corner: thud, thud, thud. (When you’re flustered and operating in another language and it’s hard to recalibrate, sometimes you—meaning me—just keep heading toward disaster.)

Maybe I misgendered this word, I thought. Grammatical mistakes can cause a surprising level of offense in some persons of the Gallic persuasion. So I changed the ending of my special word from the feminine -euse to -eur and said it again.

And to add pornographic imagery to insult, I made a circular frothing movement with my hand, like whipping cream. Then I gestured broadly toward the coffee-maker section and said indignantly, “You have all those —surely you have this.”

That’s when Delphine gave me the bun, turning completely away as she said, “Madame, you must go to another store for that.” It was the French sales-clerk version of you are dead to me.

The next day I told this story—complete with hand motions—to a French friend who literally put his face on the table when I said my special word. He could not speak for more than a minute. All I heard were muffled sobs and snorts.

I know French speakers read this column, and you’ve guessed what I said. I apologize for this and any future harm.

My brain took the English word frother and leapt absurdly to the French word frotteur—which, dear English speakers, has nothing to do with coffee drinks. It means creepy groper. Like a subway sexual assaulter.

Poor Delphine. In hindsight, I’m sure she thought I was clumsily trying to ask for a sex toy. Consider this: I was standing there with my American accent in an appliance store, demanding some type of groper with different gender affiliations. I must’ve looked desperate, wandering the fluorescent tundra of the Best Buy of France, looking for love in all the wrong places.

This is not the only time I was Roomba-ing around Paris.

One day I came home and a neighbor was standing in the courtyard with a pile of boxes. I jokingly asked if she was moving, and she said, “I’m bringing these back from my mother’s place.”

Or so I thought.

I leapt into action, eager to be an exceptionally helpful neighbor—as a newbie in the building, and an immigrant from a particularly hegemonistic country, ahem. Besides, she’s one of the kindest people in a building full of them. I was ready to carry all the boxes up any number of flights. And luckily, I’d been training for this moment all year by hauling the suitcases of the approximately 211 houseguests who have visited me.

Me: “I’ll help you!”
Sweet Neighbor: “Don’t worry, it’s not far.”
Me: “It’s no problem—I’m really strong,” I say, hoisting the biggest box as she protests.
Sweet Neighbor: “REALLY, it’s OK,” she says, trying to get the box back from me as I stride toward the stairway.
Me: “I’ve got it!” I say, as she follows me.
Sweet Neighbor: “But I’m going out,” she says, pointing to the front door. “I’m taking these to my mother’s place.”
Me: “Oh… sorry,” I say, screeching to an embarrassed halt and relinquishing the box.

She was LEAVING, not ARRIVING. I’d somehow heard de (from) when she said à (to), or maybe mixed up an amener and a ramener. A minor shift of vowel and voilà: I got it completely wrong.

Sweet Neighbor: “Ça va!” she says, laughing.

I help put the boxes on the foldable silver wheely cart she had prepared to roll everything out to a cab. I just keep talking, as is my way: “Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve seen one of these baggage chariots with the… élastique-truc thing… damn, what is ‘bungee cord’ in French?”

I was tempted to improvise a French word at that moment, but I know better now and looked it up. A bungee cord with hooks is a tendeur, which—to the best of my knowledge—doesn’t have a vulgar alternate meaning, though it really sounds like it should.

(If I’m wrong about that, feel free to correct me, dear readers. Everyone else does.)

There are times when my fellow English speakers and I deliberately and annoyingly abuse the French language for our own amusement. We call each other up and say, in Franglais, “I hope I’m not deranging you”—from déranger—because we think it’s hilarious, and surely better than “bother you.” (And truth: I often do derange the people I talk to.)

And what New Yorker wouldn’t delight in saying, “I’m sorry I’m late, the subway was perturbed,” playing off the French word perturbé? It is deeply satisfying to call your public transit system irritable and/or insane.

In our defense, all kinds of unspeakable things are happening to the English language in Paris. For example, I live near a clothing store called Make My Lemonade, a daycare center called People & Baby, and a make-up store called “Oh My Cream!”.

Despite these regular humblings, I adore being between languages. And it’s good for my brain; I am my own Wordle.

This week I was at the vet with my cosseted old Cavalier King Charles spaniel, and we were chatting about my move from New York and all the vaccine documentation one needs for visas in France—both for me and the dog.

They asked whether the U.S. requires vaccins contre la rage to reenter the country. I’ve been in a rage-despair-grief spin cycle over what’s been happening in my ex-country, and in the world, thanks to its leadership. Perhaps that’s why my first thought was: Wait. There is a vaccine for rage?

Alas, no. She was talking about rabies. They call it la rage here. (But someone should get working on that rage vaccine.)

And then I learned another new phrase.

The vet told me my nine-year-old lap dog has a souffle au cœur.

My mind did what it always does in French: it translated both literally and with too much imagination. Breath of the heart. It sounded like something from a poem. Or a film, Godard’s À bout de souffle—Breathless.

I’m still a little undone by the way this language can take a blunt fact and wrap it in velvet.

In English it’s just “heart murmur”—a slight backwash of blood in the mitral valve, common to his breed, asymptomatic for now. Not poetic. Just the beginning of a predictable, progressive disease—the kind you can slow down with treatment, but not cure. He’ll need monitoring. Regular scans. Better food. The unromantic tasks of loving a small animal with a finite body.

I asked the vet about the one thing my dog loves most: chasing the ball as if it owes him money. Moderate walks are fine, he said, but don’t let him overexert himself or get overheated. If he’s panting, make sure he rests.

“But he still has so much energy,” I said. “He really runs.”

“Oui,” he said. “Mais doucement, doucement.” Palms down, like he was lowering the volume on my dog’s entire nervous system. “Pas trop.”

Doucement… softly, gently, sweetly. Such a beautiful word. I wanted to tell him that Luni is already, by nature, a little noodle of a dog. But that wasn’t the point.

And then he said something I didn’t fully understand—something with épuiser and cœur—but I got the gist: Don’t use up his heart. Don’t spend it too fast. Don’t burn through his time for a game of fetch.

I don’t have the words in French or English for that eternal equation of time versus intensity. We humans feel that mortal trade-off instinctively. Luni, on the other hand, chases and snores and snuffles up his kibble, unaware of the choices I make for him.

He is, however, very sure that I now roll the ball down the path way too doucement for his taste. His eyes get wild with anticipation, and the second my hand finally lets go of The Orb of Happiness, he flings himself after it. I wonder if he thinks it’s me that’s slowing down.

The vet sent me home with a laminated info card about his condition—with illustrated hearts in various states of distress (each a little more enlarged), lots of French medical vocabulary, and a QR code so I can download an app to help me track his resting breath rate. (I have my Fitbit; he has me.)

Reading between the lines and the languages, I think what they’re saying is that Luni has joined me and many of my human friends. We get preventive scans almost year-round. We nip things in the bud. We take too many supplements. We fret about new spots and make peace with old ones. We still chase the ball. And we know the strength of un cœur tendre.

Related: Being Very Wrong About French Things (2025)