6 min
Faux French Borrowings in English
In our French-language sibling series Points de langue, our linguists examined French words that look English and sound English but, well, aren’t really English. French-but-not-English words like tennisman, camping-car and balltrap demonstrate how a language can borrow elements of another language to create words that don’t exist in the donor language’s lexicon.
Dubbed false borrowings or pseudo-borrowings by linguists, such cases come with interesting etymological and semantic nuances. They can also cause misunderstandings or embarrassments for everyday speakers and translators.
French has plenty of faux anglicisms, but faux gallicisms in English are comparatively rare. Very few French-looking English words (or their usage) are entirely alien to modern francophones. More typically, French words become supplanted in French by more common synonyms, even if anglophones assume that their own use of the same French-ish words is au courant.
This instalment of Language Matters details prominent examples of English words with questionable French credentials: expressions that have fallen by the wayside in modern French, words whose meanings have drifted from their French origins, and cases of popular anglicized French that might not deliver the intended meaning with native French speakers.
Patterns of Faux Gallicisms
Obsolescence
It’s often the case that modern French has long retired a word or expression that English has steadfastly carried forward. For instance, English refuses to throw out the French word accoutrement as a formal term for the equipment needed for an activity, even though this Middle French-derived word has long been replaced by modern francophones with équipement.
The interjection sacre bleu is even more glaring. English speakers (particularly older ones) might toss this out jokingly to express surprise in a context featuring French people or culture. It shows up prominently in satires; the variant spelling sacré bleu with the accented ending might indicate a bit of anglicized exaggeration, given that the original French sacrebleu never takes an accent mark and isn’t pronounced with one either. But the word has virtually disappeared from modern French, and anglophones who use it among a francophone audience might sound out-of-date at best or insulting at worst, even if reaching for a humorous effect.
Decoupling
Some French words have split apart in the process of becoming English terms. These cleaved words sometimes morph into new forms that merely echo their original French sense. In English, en suite describes a bathroom that is only accessible through a bedroom. Francophones know ensuite as a one-word adverb meaning “afterwards” or, in a strictly spatial sense, “located behind”, which helps explain how such an adjoining space came to have this name. English adopted and decoupled en suite in the 18th century and put it to work exclusively in the sense known to anglophones today.
Semantic Narrowing
English often borrows and then narrows a French word’s semantic coverage such that the two versions’ meanings only partially overlap. This happened with the English word auteur, which describes “a director whose film reflects their personal creative vision” and emerged from discussions within French film circles in the 1950s and ’60s. Anglophones absorbed the cinematic sense of the word but left behind the broader meaning of the French noun that may apply to creators working in different media or even to people who devise and carry out plans, like an auteur du crime (“author of a crime”).
Shortenings
Several faux gallicisms result from French phrases that have been shortened. In borrowing a French phrase, English sometimes drops the portion following its head noun (often the de + X construction, as in the French noun robe de chambre). This clipped version comes to signify for anglophones what the longer noun means to francophones. For example, anglophones can say coup d’état to describe a sudden seizure of a government, though they often just say coup. But in French, the word coup has several possible meanings, and francophones would not naturally ascribe the isolated word to the noun that anglophones have in mind. The same element is at play in the English word passé (passé de mode).
Some cases combine the patterns discussed above. The English word portmanteau is both a shortening of a French word (mot-portemanteau) and a loanword whose source word has given way to a different term in the native language (French speakers more commonly say mot-valise to describe a word fashioned by combining two other words).
With these points in mind, the sections below organize common faux gallicisms according to semantic theme, pausing to dwell on interesting etymological features.
Note: False borrowings and false friends are distinct, but they overlap. A false-friend pair describes two words across two languages whose appearance compels someone to assume that they mean the same thing. The noun pain in English is a false friend of the noun pain in French, which means bread.
À la table
The culinary scene serves up plenty of faux or pseudo-faux French.
As a North American anglophone, you might sit down for a robust entrée at a francophone eatery, only to glumly look down upon a portion more befitting of an appetizer. Use of the French word entrée dates back to the 1500s to name the initial, light course (the “entry”) of a meal. English forked the word over to its plate in the 1600s, where it sat until North Americans in the 20th century tweaked it to describe the main course (plat principal). The translation may have resulted from confusion: traditionally, an entrée was preceded by several even-smaller starters.
Puzzled by your portion, you call out for the head waiter: “Maitre d’!” Despite your confidence, the word produces hesitation among the restaurant staff. Though maitre d’ refers to the same employee as the French maître d’hôtel, the clipping of hôtel (an example of compound elision of a loanword) and the hard insistence on the preposition component d’ as the anglicized letter D have rendered it more foreign to the francophone ear than might be assumed. The English noun emerged during World War II, one of several wartime shortenings or corruptions of French vocabulary that anglophone soldiers brought home with them.
To soothe your nerves, you decide some apple pie à la mode is in order. For North Americans, this French phrase requests a scoop of ice cream (typically vanilla) served with a dessert (typically on top). This usage is unheard of in French, however, where à la mode translates to fashionable or in fashion (English knows it this way as well). À la mode in its dessert sense emerged in American print near the start of the 20th century, spiked during World War II, and settled down as a descriptor of a staple Americana add-on to an already sweet treat.
Sexee Words
A handful of French-curious English words carry a sexual shade unfamiliar to modern francophones.
Consider double entendre. Antidote’s dictionary defines it as “a word or phrase with two possible interpretations, one of which is racy or risqué…” (more on risqué soon). While 17th-century French indeed used the expression à double entendre (as well as its more grammatically correct variant, à double entente) to describe language with two potential meanings, including one that is likely too sexual for polite society, modern francophones don’t recognize this meaning today. Other nouns like sous-entendu (“under-heard”) and expression à double sens (“phrase with a double meaning”) are more common for what anglophones still know as a double entendre.
Back to risqué. English-speakers use this adjective to describe something as slightly inappropriate because of its sexual content. A movie might be too risqué to show to children, for instance. Importantly, it’s not gratuitously sexual and thus not evidently inappropriate. It would be risky to show the movie. This latter sense of something being fraught with risk (un pari risqué) is how francophones largely know the word. A variant meaning of the French adjective also describes something that shocks or offends (une plaisanterie risquée), but it doesn’t carry the presumptive sexual charge of the English form.
A similar current hums under ooh la la, a popular English interjection for when the speaker finds something surprising or alluring, often with a sexual connotation. An anglophone admiring a racy bit of clothing or reacting to some titillating gossip might exclaim ooh la la in a joking manner. In French, oh là là (note the different spelling and accent marks) doesn’t suggest sexual intrigue; in fact it signals exasperation, similar to how an anglophone might mutter oh man or, more formally, oh dear. The French interjection (h)oulala gets a bit closer in that it suggests surprise, but again, it lacks the sexual suggestion of the English version.
Duped!
Some suspiciously French words circling the theme of deception require a second look.
The word exposé flaunts its Frenchness with an accented vowel, but beware: the English noun means a text that reveals previously concealed information; the French noun exposé contains a more neutral sense of presenting something with no suggestion of disclosing secrets or wrongdoing. Une révélation is the best equivalent for that.
There’s more trickery afoot in nom de plume, a fake name used by a writer. Antidote’s English dictionary etymology note tells us that the noun didn’t exist in French before it emerged in English in the early 19th century:
The previous expression nom de guerre, unambiguously taken from early 17th-century Classical French, served as a model for this coinage. The reference to war in nom de guerre, perhaps felt by English writers and speakers as being inappropriate when applied to activities of an artistic nature, was removed and replaced by a literary symbol (the quill).
The term pen name only emerged in English in the 1860s. Even more interesting is the eventual French-language adoption of the original nom de plume in the 1970s to mean a “literary pseudonym”, thus completing the circle of an original English word composed of French elements being reabsorbed into the native tongue.
For a final act of deception, the English noun legerdemain describes tricks performed with one’s hands, but the real illusion is how little the word registers in modern French. Its earliest known English use dates back to the 12th century, where it was indeed borrowed from the Middle French phrase leger de main (“light of hand”). But it has fallen out of common use among francophones. To describe what a dextrous magician or card-sleeving poker player does, French speakers will employ prestidigitation or tour de passe-passe, or tour d’adresse for the broader sense of an impressive feat that may or may not involve sleight of hand.
Seems there’s more than meets the eye with French-looking English words!
