Here we are, then, at your standard insufferable dinner party, vintage knick knacks as decoration, with two blandly attractive late-twentysomethings hanging out in some newly gentrified area of London. The blandly attractive French woman sniffs appreciatively, introducing herself. “Hi, what is for dinner?” “We’re having beef stew,” the blandly attractive Englishman answers, as if he were performing an alchemical feat rather than making the universal meal of Meat In Sauce. She looks puzzled, so he asks his tablet: “OK Google, show me pictures of beef stew.” She replies, understanding: “Ragoût.” The French word for stew. But that’s not good enough for our protagonist.
“No, not bolognese,” he corrects, unwilling to believe that his French companion might have a better grasp of her own language than he, a man blessed with a Y chromosome and an understanding of the world’s tongues that she, a mere woman, couldn’t possibly match. He goes back to his tablet, aiming to prove this silly little girl wrong. “How do you say ‘beef stew’ in French?” Even his own tablet has tired of this irksome blimp and cheerfully announces: “Ragoût de boeuf.”
The woman happily agrees with the tablet, graciously sparing the man his blushes and presumably kickstarting the kind of quirky romance all decent people know and despise. Far better, you’d have thought, for her to grab the tablet from him and bellow into it: “OK, Google. What’s French for ‘Piss off, you patronising bellend. Your stew looks watery anyway’?”
