It's All About the Accent

I'm so impressed with David. He has faithfully been studying up on his French far more consistently than anyone else in this house. He's had me stick labels throughout the house; "la table" on our dining room table, "le chaise" on his chair, "le bureau" stuck to our desk, "l'ordinateur" attached to the computer...

And barely a single conversation goes by without his attempt at recalling a french word or asking, "how do you say..." I should be encouraged by this. Not only because it shows how engaged he is with this adventure and how much he has embraced it, but because typically I know the answers to his French questions. Sadly though, I don't think very many French people are going to be asking me, "what's the word for 'window.'" (It's fenetre, by the way.)

But this week, David posed the question of questions. A true "Erin Moment" if I've ever seen one. See, I've been known to ask some pretty dumb questions in my time. (And don't tell me there is no such thing as a dumb question. Oh, yes there is.) David's favorite dumb question of mine is probably from when we went to a Seattle Mariners game at Safeco Field. We were fully into the game when I looked around and asked where they post the diagram of the baseball diamond so you could see which bases had players on them and which didn't. I was dead serious. David and his brother-in-law looked at me and then looked at each other, eyebrows raised. David, leaned his head toward mine, put his arm around me, pointed to the field and in his most sincere voice said, "see the big baseball diamond on the field? You can just look there to find out who's on base." Then he and Mike promptly injured themselves from their fit of hysterics. They literally cried from laughing so hard.

I don't think anyone will ever top that moment as far as sincerely asking the most ludicrous. But this week, David's question to me was a pretty good attempt. "What's the French word for 'baguette?'" He made this question all the more hilarious because his pronunciation of "baguette" was so decidedly French. I thought he was making one of his eye-roll jokes. So, in a much less sincere way than his Safeco Field moment, I put on the dumbest expression I could muster and went, "uuhhhh, geeeeee, I dunno...maybe 'baguette?'" When he began to laugh with a similar intensity as with my baseball inquiry, I realized he, too, had been dead serious.

And this from the man whom I've told repeatedly, "if you don't know the word in French, just try saying the English word with a French accent. Odds are you will probably be right."