Bonjour!

I’ve been using “bonjour” since I was in middle school.  We would say it walking into class or passing the French teacher in the hallway.  I figured after seven years of French I had pretty much mastered that word.  It’s a simple greeting used as you pass someone, just like saying “hello”, right?

Turns out, I’m wrong. 

Ok so before you all judge me I just want a chance to defend myself. I really did know this before, I just had never really thought about it or needed to use French outside of the school day.  The literal translation would look like this:

Bon= good

Jour = day

Bon + jour = good day

Being the die-hard Muskies that we are, we thought we had the right to try out the Muskie Bonjour while in France.  Therefore, when we saw a group pass us on campus one night, we put on our best French accents and said, “Bonjour!” 

We were feeling pretty fluent in our new language until the passing group all responded, “Bonsoir!”

Of course.  Soir means “night”.  So at 8pm we probably should have not been greeting them “Good day”.  And although Bonsoir Group didn’t say anything else to us, I bet they were thinking that Americans couldn’t even tell the difference between day and night.

On a related note, today I saw a girl dragging around a huge suitcase.  I greeted her with a well-timed “Bonjour!” and she responded with “Hi!”  I was convinced she was an American just arriving in France so I started talking to her in English. 

She’s Italian and doesn’t even know English.  I guess it’s ok to use English greetings here, which is great to find out after spending all that time figuring out the French ones.