Jean-Paul Nerri?re has declared that the new lingua franca of the global village is Globish. If you can’t master English, try Globish:
The main principles of Globish are a vocabulary of only 1,500 words in English (the OED lists 615,000), gestures and repetition.
[...]
The seeds for Globish came about in the 1980s when Nerri?re was working for IBM in Paris with colleagues of about 40 nationalities. At a meeting where they were to be addressed by two Americans whose flight had been delayed, they started exchanging shoptalk in what Nerri?re calls “une certaine forme d’anglais perverti.” Then the Americans arrived and beyond their opening phrases, “Call me Jim,” “Call me Bill,” no one understood a word. And Jim and Bill, needless to say, did not understand perverted English.
Nerri?re’s site, jpn-globish.com, has a number of articles, in French, about English (or American) and Globish. Naturally, “Fuck”, un mot ? ne pas employer, mais ? conna?tre et reconna?tre caught my eye. Reading about your own language’s argot can be quite amusing. I enjoyed this pre-Starbucks joke (at Americans’ expense):
En revanche, si vous voulez vous illustrer aux yeux de vos amis am?ricains, vous pouvez leur poser la devinette suivante: “what is the difference between the american coffee and making love on a beach?” (“Quelle est la diff?rence entre le caf? am?ricain et faire l’amour sur une plage?”, le caf? de l?-bas ?tant connu pour sa dilution, ? l’oppos? des pr?f?rences fran?aises et italiennes qui r?clament la concentration savoureuse).R?ponse “There is no difference, they are both fucking close to water”. Difficilement traduisible en fran?ais, mais l’effet est assur?.