"Est-ce que vous avez un pochon?"

While I was in France, I shopped at the local Super U mega-grocery store for some gifts to take back to Korea. My cart now loaded with goodies, I got in line for the cashier. The line moved slowly, but when it was finally my turn, I asked the cashier whether she had a plastic bag for me to put my items in. I phrased my question thus:

"Est-ce que vous avez un pochon?"

As I explained to Dominique and family later that evening, the cashier looked at me as if I had sprouted a second head ("Elle m'a regardé comme si j'avais poussé une deuxième tête!"). Immediately understanding that pochon was the wrong word, I tried to clarify by asking for either "un sachet" or "un sac en plastique."

After the cashier shook herself free of her surprise, she asked me, "Est-ce que vous êtes belge?" Are you Belgian? "On dit ça en Belgique." People say that in Belgium.

"No," I told her lamely, "but people said 'pochon' back in the 1980s." She didn't seem very impressed. I began to wonder whether I had simply made the word up in my head, then convinced myself that it was a legitimate French word.

When I relayed all this to Dominique, he laughed and said, "Pochon, c'est une expression nantaise," i.e., the word pochon is a regionalism used in the Nantes area. So I was reassured that I hadn't hallucinated the word, nor had I learned it and used it incorrectly. I simply hadn't realized the expression wasn't used all over France.

I noted to Dom that, in French-speaking Switzerland (la suisse romande), they say un cornet when asking for a bag. Later on, I realized that the cashier had never given me a bag because France had banned all plastic shopping bags in 2016. In France these days, everything is éco and bio, i.e., green. Think: America's current attempt to ban plastic straws.


Anyway, I came away having learned something new about an old word. In fact, I got corrected a lot this time around, mainly by Dominique. I really need to work on my French, which has gotten rusty (rouillé) from lack of use.