A MIDDLE class man is too scared to ask for a croissant in a crowded café in case other middle class people make fun of his pronunciation.
Martin Bishop, from Crouch End, has eaten hundreds of croissants in his life but has always avoided saying the word out loud in case he is mocked by people who think they are more cosmopolitan than he is.
Bishop said: “As a middle class man it’s pretty much mandatory that I am able pronounce it, but I live in fear of revealing I only got a D in GCSE French and have never summered on the Côte d’Azur, which I also can’t pronounce.
“Is it ‘crosson’ or ‘cwasson’? Does pronouncing the ‘t’ at the end indicate I am an uneducated cretin or suggest to impressed listeners that I’m using the regional dialect of Aquitaine?
“And how much accent should I use? Too little sounds like I passive-aggressively hate the French and too much makes me seem like the stupid policeman from ‘Allo ‘Allo.
“This may sound like a first world problem, but my friends are such superficial bastards that they’d disown me.
“We all remember what happened to Emma when she tried to say ‘chipotle’.”
