A French Faux Pas

OK, we’ve all done it:  Made a faux pas.  Some faux pas are worse than others. It seems especially easy to do when you’re a foreigner and you aren’t fluent in the language.  You’re trying to carry on a conversation and attempting to a) get your verb tenses right so you don’t sound like Forrest Gump (“I study French since 2 years!”) and b) avoid being blunt to the point of sounding dictatorial (“I must leave immediately!” when you mean to convey that you should probably be going soon).  But we all make mistakes.  I wish that my most recent faux pas, however, was merely one of a mistaken verb tense or misplaced adjective. Last weekend my boyfriend and I went to Cassis for his company retreat.  Friday night was dinner at the boss’s house, and Saturday was a beach day.  I was fairly nervous, since everyone at the dinner would be speaking French and although I’ve improved a lot, I’m still not fluent.  Towards the beginning of the evening, people were talking about going swimming at the beach the next day, which I wasn’t going to do because of my shark phobia.  Yes, it’s irrational, but my overactive childhood imagination (I was convinced that a shark was going to burst through the concrete walls of a swimming pool) has clearly scarred me for life.  I began explaining to a small group of people, in French, why I’d go to the beach but wouldn’t actually go in the water.  Things were actually going pretty well.  Hell, I even remembered the word for “shark!”  I was proud.  Maybe I was too proud to the point of losing my concentration. As I went on, I meant to say that even though I didn’t swim in the ocean, I still enjoyed the beach because I could relax and suntan – bronzer.  But I replaced the “Z” in bronzer with an “L.”  For all of you wholesome people out there, bronler means “to give a hand job.”  And I was talking in a very animated matter too, because I was thinking, “Damn, I’m really doing well here – telling childhood anecdotes in French!” Everyone stared at me with their mouths agape while my boyfriend proceeded to tell me that I’d just said that I like going to the beach because I could relax and give hand jobs.  Needless to say, I was mortified, but I quickly tried to recover my composure by making light of the situation and of myself.  I said something like, “Well, if there’s a cute boy, you never know!” But by that point I was the only one chuckling and I seriously think people might have been wondering if I wasn’t, in fact, a prof d’anglais, but a hooker.  Hopefully the next time I attempt at anecdote at a soiree, it’ll be a little less risqué. My advice?  Make sure to know your verbs – the ones your grannie wouldn’t be horrified to hear.