Words and Stuff
Part of the fun of a holiday abroad has long been the discovery of an amusing translation on a foreign menu. ‘Strawberries and scum’, ‘Hamburger with sheeps’ and ‘Spicy cold children’ can cheer up the most forbidding meals. Not that I would do any better if I had to translate the names of British dishes into Chinese or Catalan. Many are strange enough in English: toad-in-the-hole, angels on horseback, queen of puddings. Yet some translations are inspired. Who could ask for a better description of a bottle of wine than ‘A mouth hit I am wimpy in a brilliant fragrance to let you yearn for berries’?
We should remember too that we’re not always very good ourselves at getting foreign terms right. The ‘chaise lounge’, ubiquitous in America, is another inspired corruption, but French tourists must find it strange when a request for a chaise longue is greeted with bafflement.
Most must also be surprised by the British terms bon viveur and bonne bouche. A bon vivant is well known to the French as ‘someone fond of good living’, but a bon viveur isn’t. And a bonne bouche is for them ‘a pleasant taste in the mouth’, whereas we use it to mean a ‘delicious morsel’. As for bon appétit, it may go down all right with the young, but their parents consider it bad manners to be wished, ‘Good digestion.’
Before eating our bonnes bouches, we may be seated according to a ‘placement’, an English word borrowed from the French – who never knew they had it, or at least not meaning what they call a plan de table. However, if the meal is placé, there may be a placement à l’anglaise, in which the host and hostess don’t sit next to each other, as in France, but at opposite ends of the table.
The word traffic can sometimes be two-way. The Old French jargoun came to Late Middle English meaning a ‘twittering’ of birds. In England ‘jargon’ took on the meaning of a ‘barbarous, rude or debased language’, ie ‘techspeak’, which is now also, along with ‘gibberish’, its meaning in France. The word ‘versatile’ has made a similar return journey, starting out in France to mean ‘changeable’, ‘fickle’ or ‘capricious’, acquiring the meaning in English of ‘having a facility in turning from one skill to the next’ and then carrying that new meaning back to France.
The journey may sometimes start in Britain. There are certainly many English words that are borrowed by others and even improved in spelling, if not in meaning. The Turkish feribot is, for example, much easier for most nonEnglish-speakers to read than ‘ferry boat’. ‘Riding coat’, too, has been tidied up, this time by the French, who write it redingote, though it seldom gets an outing these days. In Victorian England, though, the redingote, a highly tailored outer garment, was widely worn, and not just for riding.
In those days the British often made no attempt to pronounce stolen French words as the French would. Gare de l’eau! cried out as chamber pots were emptied from high windows in Edinburgh, was heard as ‘Gardy loo!’ in the street below. Every consonant was pronounced in valet. And assiette was ‘ashet’. But now the fashion, at least among the pretentious, is to frenchify as many words as possible. ‘Fillet’ has become ‘filay’. ‘Homage’, rhyming with porridge, has returned to being hommage (or rather ‘ommarge’). And ‘author’ has become auteur.
Most comic of all is, appropriately, the coup de grâce. Since even the pretentious are not always confident about foreign pronunciation yet know that final consonants tend to be silent in French, they often pronounce this expression as if it were the coup de gras, thus rendering a stroke of mercy into a stroke of blubber.