voilà

Good grief! How silly of me.

I went to a bookstore in Montreal once and asked two cute counter girls if they had a book on sailboats. They looked at me really strange, then asked me why I wanted a book about those. I told them that I was a sailor. Their faces turned white and said that the store has never had that kind of book before. Because my written French is better than my spoken French, I wrote the word "violeur". They both began to back away from me.

I turned and began cruising the isles to look for a book myself because most bookstores usually have lots of books on sailboats. Sure enough, I found one and went to buy it.

They laughed as I made my purchase. Then, they corrected my pronunciation.

The French word for sailboat is "voilier". The French word I used was "voleur" which meant "thief" but the word I wrote was "violeur" which meant "rapist". (This was before Google translate, by the way.)