Parlez-vous le français?

J'ai étudié le français pendant trois semestres et je ne peux pas me rappeler une chose!
(I studied French for 3 semesters and I can not remember a thing!)

My girlfriend and I went to mountains and the shops in Boone last weekend where we found a little French store. My girlfriend then preceeded to give me a hard time because I spoke to the store owner in French. Nothing hard just your basic Bonjour, comment-allez vous aujourd'hui? (Hello, how are you today) Of which he respondeded bien, merci beaucoup (well, thank you very much). That was the extent of the conversation and it lead her to poke fun at me <_<

She is taking her second semester of French and it shames me to say that while I did study french for 3 semesters in colloge I really don’t remember it like I should. Much less ever hope to be fluent. This did however spark my interest into a popular phrase in French (at least one everybody in english knows) and what it really means is very interetsing.

sacrebleu or sacredieu

Quote from Wikipedia
“Sacrebleu is an old French profanity, meant as a cry of surprise or anger. It would be equivalent to gosh or by Jove. Most likely, it comes from old blasphemous curses relating to God, used from the late Middle-Age (some are attested as early as the 12th century) to the 14th at the latest, with many variants: morbleu or mordieu, corbleu, palsambleu, jarnidieu, tudieu, respectively standing for mort [de] Dieu (God's death), corps [de] Dieu (God's body), par le sang [de] Dieu (by God's blood, the two latters possibly referring to the Eucharistic bread and wine), je renie Dieu (I deny God), tue Dieu (kill God)... Those curses may be compared to the archaic English [God']sdeath, sblood, struth or zounds (God's wounds). Thus it would be in modern French je sacre par Dieu and in English I curse by God. They were considered so offensive that Dieu was sublimated into the neutral syllable bleu, which sounds similar and literally means "blue", but there may not be any etymological connection.”

Granted the article did go one to say it is most commonly used in a humorous manner these days, I just found it interetsing that it was actually a phrase of sacrulage.

Runs off to look at other old phrases and their respective means.