In France, you can wish somebody bon just about anything:
bonjour, bon courage, bon app, bonnes vacances, and, my personal
favourite, bonne fin de dimanche. But one expression which is
often avoided is bonne chance. Not because the French are too
rational to believe in luck, but because, as in many other
cultures, wishing somebody good luck is thought, even more
superstitiously, to bring about bad luck. To avoid doing so, in
English we have the dramatic "break a leg" and the Italians wish
each other the daringly romantic in bocca al lupo ("into the
mouth of the wolf"). So what do the French say? But luckily for
those of us who are too refined to resort to scatological humour
at critical moments in our loved ones' lives, there is an
alternative. For, during the Battle of Waterloo, the famous
General Cambronne was called upon to surrender himself to the
British. The story goes that he replied that he would rather die
than do so. When summoned a second time, he simply replied,
"Merde!" The British were apparentl