Sweet taste of second tongues
Sam Leith
“Do you have an ice cream?”my wife asked the guy in the buffet car on the Eurostar in French, waving her can of beer in a friendly way. After a moment of mild confusion, he smiled and handed her a plastic beaker. My wife’s very slight Geordie accent—and assumption that “glass”in French is the same as the English word—had led to her unexpected question.