Parlez-vous

At first we greeted them from sheer pity; but the parlez-vouses passed us like so many surly oxen.

The Parlez-vouses charged us a franc a trunk for the privilege of ransacking, and then we took the steamer to Honfleur, where a carriage met us, and brought us to this pretty spot, about which I’ll tell you anon.

Red and green sweaters, leather jackets, trousers that have long since lost all originality but that of the owner, so hitched and sagged and rolled up are they, gray yarn socks, and yellow moccasins—these bind about and encumber what seems to be the jolliest crowd of “Parlez-vouses” on earth.

“Parlez-vouses or our own men?” demanded the Squire in a business-like tone.

Carol Foord of N.Y.C. is the lucky fiancée of Ham Hazlehurst, pursuing his parlez-vouses at the Sorbonne.

All this time he was speaking French, while my answers and remarks were in English. Suddenly recollecting himself, he said—“Well, here have I been parlez-vousing to you, in a way to surprise you, no doubt; but these Frenchmen have got my tongue so set to their lingo, that I have half forgotten my own language.”[…]“Here,” said he, “you are a friend of the lady, and parlez-vous so much better than I, can you tell me whether this is for jeudi, or lundi, or mardi, or whether it means no day at all.”

While my companions smoked a pipe and parlez-voused with one party, I parlezed and gesticulated with another.

In 1980, Volvo engineers sweated in Arizona, testing their prototype 760 sedans. To keep Scottsdale’s upwardly mobile from figuring out what the cars were (fat chance), the Swedes broke the “t”s off of Talbot badges, screwed on the resulting “ALBO” labels, and told people that the cars were French. The ruse might have worked, except that the six-foot-four, blue-eyed blond overseers parlez-voused English in “Ya-shoor!” Scandinavian tones.