Incidents of In My Language, That Sounds Like... specifically involving French.
- "un smoking" means "a tuxedo". (It's a loanword from English, but not in the way you'd think: it comes from "smoking jacket
".) - "attendre" means "to wait", not "to attend".
- "actuellement" means "now; currently", not "actually". And "actualités" means "news; newscast".
- The French word for 'seal' (the animal) is phoque [fɔk], which sounds like fuck. This has led to Quebecois teenagers wearing shirts that read, "Ouate de phoque" (sounds like "What the fuck"), a nonsense phrase that means "cotton batting from seals." And French comedic trio Les Inconnus made a memorable sketch out of it.
- This is endlessly amusing for English-speaking schoolchildren studying French, especially in Canada (where French is frequently a required subject, and is a common choice for a second language when it isn't). A common attempted prank by students in Canadian French classes is to try and ask the teacher the word for "seal" for a moment of "haha, the teacher said 'fuck'." This never actually works because it's so common and, incidentally, seals are often strategically omitted when teaching animal names.
- A possibly apocryphal anecdote involved a (very) English-speaking member of Parliament from the Maritimes who nonetheless dropped into French during a debate about the seal harvest. Pronouncing with great emphasis, he asked, "Est-ce que le député est conscient que nous avons des PHOQUES par-ci, des PHOQUES par là, des PHOQUES partout??!!" (Is the honorable member aware that we have seals here, seals there, seals everywhere?) Hilarity Ensued until the Speaker intervened and cautioned the MP that if he was going to keep using that word, to make very sure he was still speaking French.
- In Spanish they are called focas, which while similar, only sounds like saying fuck if you put excessive emphasis in the first syllable.
- The taxonomic term (via Latin) for seals is "phocids". It's pronounced "fo-sids", but can sound obscene if mispronounced even in English.
- Despite what you might think, the original Latin for seal ("phoca") doesn't have any unfortunate soundalikes. In classical Latin "ph" is simply a strong "p,". So you have "Poh-ka" (classical), but not "foh-ka."
- Another similar-sounding word is fac, which is an abbreviation of faculté, i.e. "faculty". It is commonly used by French students to designate the place where they attend courses. In the French film The Spanish Apartment, an English student is shocked when she hears a French student saying "Je vais à la fac." ("I'm going to the university.")
- If you're learning French animal names and see the word "ours", you'd naturally assume it means "horse" (it sounds like "horse" with a silent h). It actually means "bear".
- Conversely, some English words sound odd in French. In Montreal, you can see some panels reading 'Garage Sale'. In French, it's read as 'Dirty Garage'.
- A new word had to be invented ("ordinateur") when computers began being sold in France, because "computer" sounds like "con putain" [kɔ̃ pytɛ̃] ("cunt whore").
- Famously, when releasing their MR2 sports car in France, Toyota had to shorten the name to simply MR. MR2 in French (emme erre deux [ɛm ɛʁ dø]) sounds just like est merdeux [ɛ mɛʁdø] ("is shitty").
- There's also Motorola who made an advertising campaign about their phone, Motorola Q. The ad had "My Q" on it. In French this is "Mon Q". Which sounds exactly like "Mon cul". Which means "My ass".
- The Audi e-tron sounds very weird in French if you pronounce the "e" the French way, since "étron" means "turd".
- About France, it can sometimes be a funny place to live if you know English:
- Don't get spooked when you see a French bakery. Even if it is likely to have only word on the sign: "Pain". Yeah, that's French for "bread". "Pain/Pan" (or its homophones) also means "bread" in several other languages — including Japanese (in which case, it is borrowed from Portuguese). On that note, Pain Au Chocolat is not some form of kinky torture involving chocolate.
- And "poisson" is just fish. In one of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comics, Fat Freddy ends up in Paris by accident, and is discouraged from trying the local restaurants due to words like these on the menu.
- French saying: "Poisson sans boisson c'est du poison." (Fish without something to drink is poison).
- "Fanny" used to be a nickname for "Frances". It's still a common girl name in French-speaking countries. In the United States, it means butt, and in the British Commonwealth, it refers to a ruder part of a woman's anatomy. The opening titles to Fran Drescher's The Nanny take on a decidedly ruder meaning in New Zealand.
- Most Americans are aware that the French word for yes sounds like an English slang word for urine or... the area urine comes from: "Oui" is pronounced as "wee." This is usually the default joke when the French language comes up in an American show, as it was for the first month after Nintendo announced the name of its seventh-generation video game console.
- Don't get spooked when you see a French bakery. Even if it is likely to have only word on the sign: "Pain". Yeah, that's French for "bread". "Pain/Pan" (or its homophones) also means "bread" in several other languages — including Japanese (in which case, it is borrowed from Portuguese). On that note, Pain Au Chocolat is not some form of kinky torture involving chocolate.
- A few pitfalls for English-speaking French students (and vice-versa).
- "Surnom" means "nickname" rather than "surname" (surname is "nom de famille").
- German has the exact inverse problem: "Nachname" means "surname".
- English often uses French fruit names specifically for the dried variety of the fruit. For example, "raisins" is French for grapes, and "prunes" is French for plums.
- The verb meaning "to inhabit" in French is just "habiter", so "inhabité" means "uninhabited".
- "Chrétienté" doesn't mean "Christianity", but "Christendom". "Christianity" is "Christianisme".
- The noun "éclair" primarily means "lightning", not a pastry. Square Enix has had to rename a knife and a soldier when translating to English, so as to avoid turning Meaningful Names into Narm.
- "Surnom" means "nickname" rather than "surname" (surname is "nom de famille").
- A written only (and mostly online) example: the French word for "Hey" is "Salut". A lot of people writing on webchats tend to omit the "a", which can seem a strange way to start a conversation to English-speaking readers.
- In French, "râpé" means "grated" or "shredded", as in "fromage râpé" (grated cheese). A lot of French words with the circumflex (the "hat" over the â) used to have an "s"; compare the English word "raspy".
- The British newspaper Metro features a daily sudoku puzzle with the title "Metroku". A bilingual reader wrote to the letters page and pointed out that, in French, this sounds exactly like "mettre au cul", or "shove it up the arse".
- A classic among French students: one of the past tenses for the Latin verb "amare" (to love) goes like this: amabo, amabis, amabit, with the third one being pronounced exactly like "à ma bite" ("to(wards) my cock").
- This is part of the reason the Welsh prophet/bard Myrddin became Merlin. The original name sounded a bit like "merde", which means "shit" in French, the native tongue of English nobility at the time, but in their literary language, Latin, the resemblance is much more striking—the Latinized version Merdinus literally means "Little Shitman" (merda = "shit" + diminutive -in- + masculine nominative -us). Changing D to L gave the less offensive "Merlinus", which became "Merlin" in English.
- A non-dirty example: in the original Star Wars film trilogy dubs, half the characters' names are changed to reflect differences in pronunciation. Luke Skywalker and Leia are left alone, but Han Solo is called "Yan", since due to French's lack of an aspirated "h" sound "Han" would sound like "Anne". The chosen names of Sith change from Darth to Dark, because French has no th sound (hence the stereotype of French people pronouncing "the" as "ze"), so "Darth" would just sound like "dart", and "dark" at least makes sense in English. Following Star Wars works reverted to Han, they just kept "Dark" for "Darth".
- "This isn't a library!" Except in French/Spanish/Portuguese/Italian a librairie/librería/livreria/libreria is a bookshop, and a library is called a bibliothèque/biblioteca/biblioteca/biblioteca.
- Vladimir Putin's surname is hilarious for French-speakers: putain (one-letter difference, and pronounced basically the same) means "whore" or "bitch", used as an expletive for "fucking". As a result, French language authorities have resorted to spelling his name "Poutine", which makes some sense (it produces the closest possible French equivalent to how it's pronounced in Russian), but is also exactly the name of a Canadian dish of French fries served with cheese curds and hot gravy.
- There is a town near Manchester, England, called Sale. It tried to twin with a comparable town in France but got no offers. From a French point of view, who wants their town twinned with somewhere called Dirty? Especially when an extension of the word in French swearing is sale con, or dirty cunt....
- An intra-language example: in European French, "gosses" is a slang term for "children", but in Quebec the same word is slang for "testicles".
- The French word for "late" is "en retard". To English speakers learning French, "en" sounds very much like "un" (the indefinite article), so "Je suis en retard" ("I am running late") sounds an awful lot like "I'm a retard" (the literal meaning of "retarded" is "delayed").
- Teaching 11-year old French students about English irregular verbs can be... patience-testing, at best. Amongst the first verbs on the list? Bite and burn, which read with a French accent, sound like cock and balls.
- The word written sein means "to be" in German and "breast" in French.
- Joe Biden's middle name is Robinette, which sounds like a feminized version of the French word for "water tap", "robinet" (pronounced [ʁobine]).
- There is a certain species of bird whose French name is "coq de roche". Unfortunately, it is far too easy to translate this to "rock cock".
- In French, "intercours" means "the five minute between two class periods (or, for some teachers, between two hours of the same course") and not sexual relation.
- "RAF" is occasionally used in colloquial French for "Rien à faire" or, less politely, "Rien à foutre" (resp. "Not caring" and "Not giving a damn").
- "College" in French is used for a school accepting children between 11 and 15.
- The French word "douche" ("shower", the object) is pronounced the same way as "douche" in English.
- In French "Nègre" is a last name as well (such as with French record executive and talent show judge Pascal Nègre) but it is exactly the French equivalent of the N-word.
- Some Turkish names tend to sound... odd to the French. The best example is the male name "Tamer", which means "skilled, respected person" or "the one who is completely manly". Calling out this name in the streets of a French-speaking city is... awkward to say the least. Tamer is spelt the same as "ta mère" in French, which means "your mom".
- A lesser example would be the female name "Naz", which means "coyness" in Turkish and "good for nothing" in French (also spelt as "naze").
- "parking" in English is a verb, and means the act of parking a car. "parking" in French is a noun, and means the place where you park a car (which in English is a "car park").
- Sean Connery's surname sounds like the French word connerie, which means either "bullshit" or "stupidity". This also leads to a joke that if Aretha Franklin married him, her married name would have been "Aretha Connery", which sounds like "Arrete ta connerie" ("Stop your bullshit"/"Stop your stupidity"). Likewise, Jean Dujardin said, about his spy comedy film character OSS 117 (which parodies James Bond among others): "Il est comme Sean, mais avec beaucoup de connerie." ("He's like Sean, but with plenty of stupidity.")
- "Bigot" (pronounced something like "bee-go") is a French surname. One hapless athlete had to wear a T-shirt with his surname clearly displayed on it, to the amusement of English-speakers. The meaning of the word in French is different, but pejorative too: it refers to a sanctimonious devout person.
- The Ukrainian word "patron" (Патрон, "cartridge"), which became known worldwide during the 2022 Russian invasion due to the famous bomb-sniffing dog named as such. The word "patron" means "boss" (as in, your superior at work) in French.
- Roti refers to a food in both French and Hindi. If it's pronounced with an uvular R and written with a circumflex over the O (rôti), it's French for "roast [meat]"; otherwise it's Hindi for a flatbread similar to a flour tortilla, which roti in Thai and other Southeast Asian cuisines is loosely based on.
- The names of the Teton Range and the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. In French, the word "téton" means "nipple/tit".
- In a French bar or restaurant, the patron is the owner or manager, while in English-speaking countries, patrons are customers.
- A pingouin in French refers to an auk, while a manchot refers to a penguin (or a man with only one arm). Due to confusion with the English word, it is common in French to use the word pingouin for a penguin (instead of manchot), which greatly annoys French ornithologists.
- French has many words where the last letters are silent, leading to confusion when the word is the same in other language (e.g. the last "d" in "retard" is silent).
- "Con" is French for "dumbass" or "cunt" (though the former sees much more use), but Spanish for "with".
- "Soupçon", meaning "suspicion", sounds like the expression "soup's on", and also exists as a direct loanword, albeit with the meaning changed to "inkling, trace".
- "louer" is French for "to rent", pronounced something like "lu-ey"... which sounds very close to the English pronunciation of the name Louis/Louie. (In French the name is pronounced more like "lwee".)
- "envie" does not always mean "envy". It also means "desire, want, lust". "J'ai envie de toi" and "je t'envie" don't mean "I envy you". They mean "I want you (sexually)".
- Confusingly, "envieux" does mean "envious".
- "J'ai hâte" doesn't mean "I hate...". It means "I'm eager to...". It becomes easier to decode words with circumflexes when you remember it indicates that the vowel used to be followed by an 's'. For example hâte = haste, côte = coast, etc.
- "Je suis excité" means the same thing as "I'm aroused" (i.e. it usually indicates sexual arousal).
