French follies

 I have a penchant for anything to do with words, phrases, grammar and the like, as if you haven’t guessed so far!

Now penchant is obviously derived from the French and pronounced – if you need to know – ponchon, with a strangled “g” after the first “n”. This sent me down the particular rabbit-hole of French-derived words in common English usage. In fact they’re so common that we don’t really have to italicise them and some tend to lose their accents. Some derive from Old French, Middle French and Norman French and some are used identically in both French and English.

Many of them, as you would imagine, are words for food and dining generally. Let’s start with à la carte and bon appétit. Then there’s café, chef, hors d’oeuvre, picnic (from pique-nique), menu, éclair, aperitif, baguette and sauté. There’s champagne, gastronomy, omelette, restaurant, salad, soufflé, soup, utensil, vinaigrette and zest.

We all use en route, which Americans annoyingly pronounce en route instead of on
(with that strangled “g” again) route. We often say au revoir, we use au pair, we say beau, bouquet (especially if we’re called Hyacinthe Bucket), bureau, chauffeur, cliché, début, entrepreneur, exposé, fiancé (for men) and fiancée (for women).

One word which surprised me with its French derivation was gaffe which apart from its usual meaning of a socially embarrassing misspeak is, as gaff, also a word for boathook and for house in Ireland.

Genre has French derivation, so does impasse, queue, papier-mâché, rendezvous, souvenir (from the French for remember), voyeur, bizarre, blank (from blanc), blasé and bourgeois.

Abbey comes from the French as does arcade, boutique, cinema, garage and terrace. There’s kilogram, lacrosse, literature, machine, magnificent, massage, metabolism, metro, navy, neutral, nocturnal, novel, occasion, optimism, parasol, poetic, premiere and purify. Recipient is from French as are reservoir, ricochet, rich, ridicule, risqué, sabotage, sentiment, silhouette, solicitor, technique, television, tournament, uniform, valid and variety.

At the other end of the alphabet there are allowance, apostrophe, attaché, avant-garde, aviation, beret, ballet, bon voyage, bureau, cabaret, cadet, chauffeur, connoisseur, cul-de-sac, debris, déjà vu, delegate detour and dossier. Energy is from French, as are elite, envisage, expatriate, façade, faux-pas, gallery, gazette, heritage, homage, hotel, identity, illusion, insult irony and jubilee.

Undoubtedly there are many, many more.

In the area of grammar, I was thinking the other day about the subjunctive verb, as you do, and realised that despite years of learning Latin verbs, I have no memory of what the subjunctive was for. Ditto the pluperfect.

I am coming to terms with having lost the battle for the use when appropriate of “which” instead of “that”.

I refuse to use nouns as verbs as in “impact” the team, or “diarise” a date.

I’m not sure a country, in contradistinction to a person, can be reclusive; North Korea comes to mind.

I recently caught rather too many people saying that Charles was going to be coronated (instead of crowned).

And I cannot understand for the life of me (another weird saying) how schools can get away with using “incursion” as the opposite of “excursion”. So excursion is when the children leave the school to go somewhere and “incursion” is used when outsiders come into the school. In fact the word “incursion” means an invasion or attack and is simply wrong in the school context. Grrrrr!

And one small, strange phrase for this week: “All the corners of the globe”. Does this, I wonder, come from those marvellous old maps with “here be dragons” at the sides and no sense of the world being round? Yet globe is a word for an entirely round object. It’s a mystery.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Former British PM Harold Wilson: “I’m an optimist, but I’m an optimist who takes his raincoat.”