Oh Stella you silly girl.

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Stella is a girl with whom I studied French in university. I met up with her in Paris when we both lived there and swapped stories about truly embarrassing things we said as we tried out our French in real life situations. On her first night living in an apartment supplied by the school she was working in, she realised that the were no curtains on the windows. Of course there were wooden shutters, but she didn’t know that. So next day she spoke with whoever was in charge, but just as she was getting into her little speech she realised that she didn’t know the French word for curtains. She chased stuff about in her head but the right word wouldn’t reveal itself - les rideaux. You knew that. Not wanting to say “les curtains” she settled on the word drapes (which actually means bed sheets) and tried to make it more French sounding by turning it into drapeaux. So she asked for some drapeaux for her windows. The word drapeaux of course is French for flags, so the person she was accosting in her search for curtains was totally baffled. And she went on and on about these flags that she needed for the windows. Poor Stella could get no satisfaction and only realised a few weeks later that she had been asking for flags.