Day 150: Faites Une Boulette!

In preparation of taking college courses for credit in the spring, I recently had to reach out to several bosses and former professors for recommendations to accompany my application. My wonderful bosses at my old job were more than happy to write recommendations and wished me courage with my future and for French academic effect I reached out to my French teacher Grégoire in New York. Respire. Unsure of how he would respond, I reluctantly sent him an email. While I was a motivated, punctual and eager student, I was also really annoying and would rather reenact Lady Gaga's 'Telephone' video with the boys in my class than the French charades he assigned us to do.
Grégoire wrote back immediately and offered that he would sign and edit a letter pre-drafted by me. Perfect. We had a series of lovely back and forth e-mails where he was happy to hear from me, wanting to know how life in Paris was and all of the catch up bullshit you write when reaching out to someone you haven't seen in years - in the formal vous (of course). I was proud of how easy writing had become compared to the last time I had written him back when I was his student. Writing a simple e-mail took longer than it should have due to my lack of ease with the language sprinkled with my lack of confidence. In short, it was pure torture.
After spending an hour or so writing an uncomfortable recommendation letter on my behalf, I had Séb proofread it and attached it to an e-mail that I sent off to Grégoire before running out to grab lunch with Milari. The following day Grégoire wrote back. And it was in English. Gasp. Which means only one thing. Grammatical error! All French privileges had been revoked where he made mention that I should take the DELF and questioned my level 'after so many years'. Damn! Feeling super cheesy, I hesitantly went back to my e-mail in search of the error. Scrolling down slowly, I eyeballed the email and at first saw no errors and then I found it. Staring me back in the face.
'Vous pouvez me lécher mes informations' I wrote. I wanted to say that he can release any information regarding me in the class but what I had said was that he can lick me my information which doesn't make sense in any language. Like pleuvoir and pleurer, I confuse the verbs lâcher and lécher. Unlike pleuvoir and pleurer, the difference between lâcher and lécher is dirty therefore making his French shutdown warranted. I showed Séb the e-mail who read it who had to grab his glasses to reread it, "That sentence doesn't even make sense," he said pointing out the obvious, "Not to mention your conjugations in the rest of the e-mail!" Thank you, dear. Very helpful.
Grégoire who certainly did not see the humor in my faux-pas sent his chilly e-mail response along with the edited letter that I pre-wrote for him where he had removed all of the cheerful American-isms like what a team player I was and how eager I was to learn and made it curt, direct, fact-oriented and well, French. He also couldn't resist mentioning that my letter had 1 grammatical error which irritated my French boyfriend as he was my editor. "Oooooh, il est chiant, ce mec!" he declared before huffing off into the next room. Pissing French guys off is so easy, just mention a grammatical error made on their part in their precious language and forget about it. La crise!
Hopefully my classes in the spring will clean up my French a bit where I'm not inviting former professors to lick me, I'll be able conjugate my verbs with more ease and won't needwordreference.com to look up formal letter closings. I feel really dumb. I really wanted to come off as more advanced than I guess I am. The only thing that has advanced is my slang (super rough 'la cité' slang, no thanks to Monsieur Flâneur who had a tendency to talk like a thug which I imitated.) and I hardly think my new skill of making snippy comments when someone cuts me at the supermarket check out is going to exactly wow Grégoire. Ok, so improve French. Just put that on the list of everything else I need to get done. Merde! I mean mince...!