Étranger? Mais non, je suis Anglais!

(post corrected)

Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language, 227:

There is a story of an Englishman sitting in a restaurant in northern France, struggling with some of the finer points of the menu. The attentive waiter spots his difficulty, and asks politely: "Monsieur est étranger?" The Englishman looks shocked, and replies, with some dignity: "Étranger? Mais non, je suis Anglais!"

Recalling an earlier post.

It's a very good book, by the way. Thank you, Language Hat.

Another tidbit from the book (167):

Once upon a time, in the days before records of Latin began, there must have been a phrase hoc die, which meant '(on) this day'. By the time of attested Latin, this phrase had eroded and fused into one word, hodie 'today'. Later on, in Old French, hodie was ground down into a meagre hui, but the French soon found that they couldn't utter this paltry syllabe with enough emphasis, so they piled up more words, and started saying au jour d'hui, literally 'on the day of this-day'. But with repeated use, this became a set phrase, and so it fused into one word again: aujourd'hui. And nowaways in colloquial French, the same cycle is beginning all over again. A mere aujourd'hui is not deemed to have sufficient presence, and so to emphasize it, the French have started saying au jour d'aujourd'hui--literally 'on the day of on-the-day-of-this-day'...