A bakery assistant was driven bananas by the number of times she was asked for see-a-batta (ciabatta) buns, instead of cha-ba-ta.
It isn't as if these words are not used on TV - seemingly the country's great educator - so people should get them right.
Mind you, news presenters also try my patience with foreign names or places and some with basic English cities.
One former presenter continually referred to the English city of Norwich (Noh-ritch) as Norr-witch. Thank God she didn't have to go for the Welsh town of llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch. To me it is ignorance but, well, it probably isn't their fault - they may well have been in the technical classes at school and learned little other than basic English.
Me, I was a languages fiend, and happily did my best at French and Japanese for four years at high school.
Japanese was regarded as being the language of the future - very much like Mandarin is at the moment - and there was an exotic thrill to studying something so different.
We began with romaji - learning through roman lettering, then progressed to the Japanese written characters of hiragana, their printed form katakana and then seniors went on to learning the Chinese-derived characters of kanji.
It was fabulous and almost 40 years on I can remember the characters and can still conduct a reasonable conversation.
French was less alluring, but I have used it more on my travels and so it is fresher in my memory.
I'm surprised I learned so much of it as in my senior year I was the only guy among 20 gals. I know, it was fun - but often difficult to concentrate.
Anyway, with the upcoming journey to France I thought I really needed to have a bit of a refresher to go with my little pocket dictionary and phrase book.
My kids put me on to a website, Duolingo (www.duolingo.com) in which you can learn French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Gaelic, Danish, Swedish and even Turkish.
My youngest lad has been getting stuck into Spanish - of which he is a natural - and is now able to have a really good conversation with someone in that language.
So he challenged me to brush up on my francais.
Duolingo is great in that you take it in steps from basic to more advanced lessons and for someone like me, returning to the language after some 26 years since being in France, it is proving very useful.
It is a very easy, step-by-step, way to learn another language.
Each lesson will teach you new vocabulary, simple grammar and the audio aspect of it will tune your ear into how French is pronounced quickly.
You are given a French sentence to translate, or an English one to turn into the French you have just learned, and the answers are immediate.
Then you get the chance to speak French and have the programme transcribe what it hears from you.
The microphone system on my laptop must be a little dodgy as it doesn't pick up all I say. If I am way off (according to Madame Duolingo) then I get a buzzer, and if I am near to correct or right then I get either an acknowledgement of well done, or a "Woot, you were close." After almost a month I have come to take the Woot as being correct.
At the end of the lesson you are asked to mark all the correct translations of a sentence. Mostly it is one but, sometimes, they try to trick you with two.
So, anyway, when we emerge from the train in Paris having crossed under the English Channel via the Chunnel I'll be putting my francais to the test from the get-go.
I'll let you know how it pans out.
Au revoir et a bientot.
-richard@richardmoore.com
Richard Moore is an award-winning Western Bay journalist and photographer.
