| I decided to take a 4-week crash course on French. I'd never studied a foreign language, but there's no time like the present for developing a smooth accent. Just concentrate, speak into a tape recorder, and soon you will be painfully aware of the contraints of the British versus the "live and let live" feelings of the Italians, who of course like to roll their R's and use nasal N's, like when they say Cinqo de Mayo they don't mean, "Drop the mayonnaise"; what they really mean is, "Show me your passport." And I hope you have it, because it's important when traveling to be able to drink hot tea with the little finger in the air. It's not as easy as you think! Actually it is harder than quantum physics! That's why one time I was talking to Dr. Stephen Hawking and he said "Isn't that something! Isn't that something! We started laughing hilariously and we had to enunciate to be understood. If you mispronounce something you could really offend somebody by saying something you didn't intend. For example, if you ask "Where is the bathroom" and you accent the positive and reject the negative, and everything will always look better when you roll your R's, you sound right Scottish. It does me up a treat! And et, und, et cetera. I was tired of all this foreign stuff.
I was ready for some authentic foreign cuisine to help get me in the mood for more lingo. So we got cream pies in the face from those angry Frenchmen. Then we retaliated with a barrage of German invective. "Du Narr!" we snarled informally. Shocked, he picked his beret out of the muddy gutter, shook it off and put it on his resume. This will surely impress them! They'll be so impressed they will spew! Just kidding, of course, but who knows, you may end up in Swaziland, in a dark jungle, surrounded by insipid but angry Frenchmen frothing epithets at us proudly patriotic Americans. THE END! |