The French you learned in school won’t get you far! Pardon My French is an entertaining and useful guide to the words and phrases every Francophile, traveler, student, and word maven should know, with fascinating lore and tidbits that make sense of the Gallic mind-set.

Englishman Charles Timoney was thrown into French life headfirst twenty-five years ago when he and his wife moved to native France. He had studied French in school, but his memory of vocabulary lists and verb-conjugation drills proved no match for day-to-day living and communicating with French coworkers. As he blundered towards fluency, he collected the idioms and phrases that no one ever taught him in a classroom and that wonderfully (sometimes wickedly) epitomized l’esprit francais. Pardon My French includes insider’s language tips for dining, shopping, understanding French slang, and more. Selections include:

• Faire un canard, which literally means “to do a duck,”but also refers to dunking sugar lumps in coffee and is the preferred way to get a kick of sugar caffeine in France.

• Tablette de chocloat, which literally means “chocolate bar,” but is also the term for a finely muscled male stomach in France. Since the English equivalent is a “six pack,” it’s a splendid example of how differently we see things!