false friends

gentle readers--Warning English Teacher Mode--
Some of you are aware of my desire to be fluent in spoken French. I can read it well enough... but to conjugate verbs on the fly in a conversation...oh mais non mes amies. In an effort to keep these undergrad skills honed I subscribe to a really sweet web page called ABOUT.com. Laura La Nazi grammaire sends me French homework-- which depending on how bored I am (or how difficult it is) I ignore. Today's homework had to do with Thanksgiving (which is not usually celebrated in France as it is an American thang.) She had a big ole list of vocab. words that have to do with T-day and one of them was la farce Which means stuffing. Which cracked me up no end. You see there is a whole genre (ooh-- did ya see that mot francais? of words called cognates which are our friends; as they have very similar spellings and meaning for example...difficile means difficult in English--not too bad right? BUT there are FALSE FRIENDS such as our little bread crumb buddy--if you read the word in French and assumed it was similar to FARCE in English it could make for a lovely Monty Python sketch. Or even better--if you are a really horrible cook your side dish could be a huge joke--like way too many over cooked oysters, or really just a bowl of slightly soggy croutons. OH look another mot francais! Je suis tres amuse!