"First of all, let's dispense with this absurd stereotype that the French are rude. The French are not rude. They just happen to hate you. But that is no reason to have bypass this beautiful country, whose master chefs have a well-deserved worldwide reputation for trying to trick people into eating snails. Nobody is sure how this got started. Probably a couple of French master chefs were standing around one day, and they found a snail, and one of them said: "I bet that if we called this something like 'escargot,' tourists would eat it." Then they had a hearty laugh, because "escargot" is the French word for "fat crawling bag of phlegm.""