"Chuckle Stop!"

Register variation assumes that the people involved are speaking just one language. But people who are bilingual or multilingual are more common in the world than monoligual speakers, and they often achieve the equivalent of register variation by switching from one language to another. It is also well-known that the English and the French use references to each other's language to refer to impolite or socially inappropriate things, as the following story indicates:

A young English man and French woman meet in Paris, and are sexually attracted to one another. They go to her flat, and before they get into bed he asks her whether she has a French letter. She decides that this is not a good time for him to be thinking about written correspondence or literature and so reaches for her capote anglaise to distract him. When he later tells his friends about his latest 'conquest', and how, soon after making love, he took French leave of her, he was not to know that at the same moment she was describing his behaviour to a friend and accusing him of having filé à l'anglaise.

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