Free French

"Y'all is confused. Vous make le steep turn trop bankay."

This hodgepodge of Basic English, pid gin French and Southern drawl, punctuated by flyers' gestures, is the lingua franca in use at a U.S. Army school for French Army aviation cadets. Before they arrived at Hawthorne Field in Orangeburg, S.C., the French trainees, fresh from service abroad, were taught 40 hours of Basic English. Meanwhile the field's American instructors were given a short course in French. But when the two groups met in the pressing routine of learning to fly, rote-learned vocabularies vanished in the propwash.

Finding their English misunderstood un less spoken with a French accent, instructors soon learned to say "Zis ees zee way" instead of "This is the way." The apt Frenchmen were soon embellishing their meager English with a Southern accent.

In this international battledore, all sorts of shuttlecock expressions have cropped up. An instructor picked up the French word for take-off--decoler, now tells his students, "O.K., let's decolate." One student wrote on a plane's maintenance report: "Tail wheel crazy." Another promised to reprove a third trainee for carelessness: "I'll give to him the hell."

In its eagerness to be cordial to the Frenchmen, sleepy little Orangeburg also has run into minor misunderstandings. When a local girl told a Frenchman she slept in the same bed with her roommate, his eyebrows rose; finally someone explained what a roommate is. Another gave a hopeful start when a proper young Orangeburger at a party one warm night remarked in her best high-school French: "Je suis chaud" (literally, "I am warm," idiomatically, "I'm feeling sexy").

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