Tag: French
There are 68 posts.
Weekly Word Watch: delicious, Louis, and #Cuéntalo
On this week’s Word Watch, we to present you another theme for our notable and newsworthy lexemes. We’ll call it ‘(Not so) lost in translation’. Delicious We begin with an incident of international – and translational – proportions. Kicking off his state visit in Sydney, French President Emmanuel Macron said to Australian Prime Minister Malcolm […]
more
This might make you feel differently about your morning alarm: the origins of ‘alarm’
It’s not a great start to the day, is it – waking up to the alarm clock? Even the most dutiful morning person will likely admit that being dragged unwillingly out of the warm depths of sleep is discouraging, disappointing, and undignified, enough to ruin any piece of music that you might choose as an […]
more
Weekly Word Watch: girther, micro-cheating, and cocoliztli
On this week’s Word Watch, we’ve got a million words – or at least a pair of words that was apparently said a million times. We better get started, unless we get to be one of those professional slackers that the travel agency TUI is seeking as fakeation specialists. Girther White House Dr Ronny Jackson […]
more
Strictly entre nous: why do we use non-English words?
Modern English is a mishmash of words from different languages. Look up the etymology of any word and you’ll be traced back to a mixture of European languages and now defunct languages, such as Latin. Many of those words would’ve morphed and evolved to the point that we now recognize and own them within the […]
more
Dog Latin: a comedy of errors
The term mother tongue used to be derogatory. Your mother tongue is the language your mother speaks, and she speaks it because she has no proper education. You, however, went to school and learned Latin. Such was the case, at least, during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when Latin served as the language of […]
more
7 English words you may not know are really French
Mayday The international distress call used by ships and aircraft instead of SOS since 1923 is ‘Mayday.’ ‘Mayday!’ from the French M’aidez! ‘Help me!’ has surely never been more relevant than in this month of May, when so many of us feel we are not waving but drowning, if not in the Mediterranean, in the […]
more
Tangled up in words? 20 tricky international tongue-twisters
It’s sometimes easy to get caught up in your own words. You say something just a bit too quickly and a jumble of sounds come out incoherently. That’s a tongue-twister – a sequence of ordinary words that become impossible to pronounce when put in succession. Children love to play with this elocutionary challenge, especially when […]
more
La politique: French political vocabulary in English
The French presidential election has brought French politics into the limelight; but it’s worth remembering that, even in English, the language of politics is full of words with a French connection. And this applies not only to the vocabulary of specifically French politics—words such as Gaullism and Mitterrandism, for example, referring to the ideas or […]
more
