In an interview before this month’s England-France rugby match, I heard a BBC reporter ask Serge Betsen, the former French international, about the time he “knocked seven bells” out of the opposition at the same ground.
I winced. Mr Betsen’s English is pretty good, but how was he to make sense of such an obscure expression? He seemed to manage. Either he guessed from the context, or, having played in England, he had heard it used before.
By contrast, when another Frenchman, the former footballer Eric Cantona, managed the New York Cosmos in a match against his old club Manchester United, he seemed to fail to understand the question: “What will it be like in the away dugout?” It was odd, perhaps, after his years in the game, but it shows that native speakers need to take care when talking to people for whom English is a second language.