Timeline for Are there any "fake" French words used in English?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 18, 2016 at 15:02 | comment | added | Casey | @Dan Well, yeah, that's where it comes from. But "chef de cuisine" is the head of the kitchen and not every chef is a "chef de cuisine." I'm not sure it's so clear to a French person if you go around calling every cook a "chef" what you mean. | |
| Jan 18, 2016 at 9:24 | comment | added | Dan | @AndrewGrimm - nice, but ... d'you not think Jack is showing off his erudition (i.e. that parley derives from parlez). The point is that not everyone gets the connection - least of all the French, because parley doesn't mean parlez! | |
| Jan 18, 2016 at 4:32 | comment | added | Golden Cuy | Pintel: "Parley? Damn to the depths whatever man that thought up parley!" Jack: "That would be the French." | |
| Jan 17, 2016 at 23:15 | comment | added | Dan | @Casey - clearly chef in French is more like 'chief' or 'head' in English. But the English use of 'chef' is closely, unambiguously and easily understood from the French chef de cuisine. The OP is seeking French words used in English whose English meaning would not easily be understood by a French speaker. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 2:47 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | @Casey Ah! As an English speaker of French, only the more common “hearing” meaning ever occurred to me. The rest never would have occurred to me to take as the meaning of the word in this phrase. That said, I can see how the other meanings could make some sense, now that you point them out. They all nicely end up with "double intentions" or somesuch as their meaning, too. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 2:35 | comment | added | Casey | @SevenSidedDie Well, it has more than one meaning, and I picked "mean" or "intend" but I guess maybe that's a stretch. "Understand" is maybe more likely. You could see here for a number of other possibilities. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 1:34 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | @Casey You mean “double to hear”. Ironically, though it's not proper French, it's still sensical in French. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 0:12 | comment | added | Casey | I think the example of "double entrendre" is a good one; there's one that we think of as French -- it's not unusual to see it in italics and many people insist on pronouncing it with a French accent, despite it being nonsense ("double to mean") in French. But we have very many French-origin words that no one would do that with because their foreignness is no longer really felt. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 0:10 | comment | added | Casey | @Dan No, it means "leader." "Chief" comes from the Old French version of the same word. | |
| Jan 15, 2016 at 23:21 | comment | added | Dan | @Casey - doesn't 'chef' mean pretty much the same thing in English and French. The idea here, I think, is a word clearly from French, but with a sense as far away as possible from the French usage. I'm finding it surprisingly hard to come up with good examples! | |
| Jan 15, 2016 at 20:20 | comment | added | Casey | Well if we're going to open it up to words that are derived from French but have since drifted in meeting in one language or the other we're going to go way beyond the scope of a single answer here, I think (by that standard I guess "chef" counts, for instance, but do you really think of that as a "French word?"). | |
| Jan 15, 2016 at 11:58 | comment | added | Adrian | That's a good one! | |
| Jan 15, 2016 at 11:54 | history | answered | Dan | CC BY-SA 3.0 |