Foreign words and phrases in English
Image: Portrait of Denis Diderot (1713-1784) by Louis-Michel van Loo (public domain)
Why are there so many foreign words cluttering up our language? Well, they’ve been doing it for over a thousand years now, so if it ticks you off, you’re a bit late.
As we are marking our fourth anniversary of the Red Pony Express, I thought it propitious to return to an early bugbear of mine: the French.
While words like judge, library, moral and poison (along with about 80,000 others, apparently) have been so long absorbed into English that we don’t notice their French origin at all, what about a phrase such as enfant terrible? Its French origin is rather more obvious, given that we still write it in French. But why don’t we have an English equivalent? Well, we almost do. But describing our old friend Martin Amis as either ‘a naughty child’ or ‘a precociously talented person who appears outrageous to others’ doesn’t quite capture all the implications of the phrase in French. However, through common usage in English, those implications are nevertheless mysteriously conveyed to us in the untranslated form.
So, if we know an enfant terrible when we see one, why can’t we come up with an equivalently succinct English word or phrase for it? Er … I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that people think in an unreachably different way in other places – ‘mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun’ and all that – and that the most unreachable of these is France.
