It didn’t take me long to develop a personal hypothesis that this was, at least in part, because of psychological resistance to the threat to identity posed by a foreign language. The consensus at the time was that, though it may not be true about language learning in general, it certainly seemed to apply to pronunciation: it is pretty rare for adult foreign language learners to develop native-like pronunciation (whatever that is! See Skye’s and Donna’s articles in this Think Tank). Studying to be a language teacher, I heard about the “ Critical Period Hypothesis,” saying basically that if you don’t learn a language before puberty, you will never learn it properly. “Froggies At It Again,” screamed the newspaper headlines at the slightest contretemps over the Channel. Frog-leg eating, onion-selling, garlic-stinking foes for more than a millennium were, it seemed, the perfect foil for forging a British identity. A lot of my classmates wanted nothing to do with “that Froggy stuff” (though they weren’t always as polite as that about it).
Compulsory French lessons in Northern England in the 1970s were far from the most popular item in the curriculum. Unfortunately, I knew the answer as soon as I heard the song. So why did he mangle it so badly in this song? As the recipient of a decent post-War British education, he almost certainly knew some French. The thing is Bill Wyman probably knew that, too.
Enough to make any true speaker of French squirm. It is, at best, a string of uninflected French words shoe-horned into a pattern of English syntax. You don’t have to know much French to know that that’s not French.