Beware of False Friends

Faux Amis—False Friends. Our mothers warned us about them when we were children leaving the house with keys hanging from our necks, or maybe later when we first got our hearts broken as adolescents—or maybe you were not warned about them since trust, too, is culturally bound: in some places people have to act to “earn” it; in others you can easily “lose” it without having had to do much to gain it in the first place. But whether we learned about false friends from our families or not, our French teachers necessarily mentioned them. Remember? Rude does not mean “rude” but simply harsh or tough. A demande is actually a “request” while a gourmand is not a glutton, but a gastronomic connoisseur.

While there are many ways in which using false friends can cause understanding smiles, there are certainly situations when embarrassment would be the least of your worries. For instance, a true story says that once an American ambassador and a French prime minister almost got into an international incident over the fact that the American ambassador felt accused of deception and was thus highly insulted. In French deception simply means “disappointment.”

So far, in our humble attempts at their language, we were able to avoid guffaws from the French,. On the contrary, people have been quite helpful and pleased by our efforts—but more on that issue later. While we have not yet made unacceptable mistakes, we have our little fun and quiet giggles with our own “false friends”—those words that do not mean something entirely different in French, but are used in unexpected contexts. Our couch came with directions to alternate sitting arrangements so that prolonged use of one part will not cause “undulations.” While waiting at the station for the tram that never came—while usually they ride like clockwork—the woman next to me declared that the situation was “bizarre,” and the loudspeaker above the schedule screen announced that the tram did not come because a “manifestation” in the center prevented it. There was, of course, a strike that day and people blocked the lines while in a protest, a “manifestation.”

And, Matt’s favorite . . . his colleague warned him at lunch that there was an announcement on the radio about the possibility of a “tempest” that evening. Shakespearean connotations from his college days inundated his mind. But is this really a French “false friend” in a funny context to us, or simply a third language “problem”—the woman who used it is Matt’s Chinese colleague and she was actually speaking in English for his sake (her French, by the way, is light years ahead of ours). She showed her kindness in a “small” act like choosing the most appropriate language of communication. In the middle of many false friends, there are, after all, some real ones. Cliché? Maybe, but we are finding both in this new place and are pleased by each discovery in its own way.