Gained in translation
The French have taken a lot of stick over the past few decades (not least from some of their own countrymen!) for their heroic resistance to the tidal wave of Anglification that has swept the fields of business and technology. To be fair, this mindset - sanctioned at official level through legislation such as the Loi Toubon of 1994 and lists of approved ‘French’ words for official use - has produced some rather bizarre curios. Ask any French person what the word bouteur means, and you’ll almost certainly be treated to a Gallic shrug in reply: it was originally invented in an office somewhere to give French people a way of not having to say le bulldozer. As it turns out, the word never really caught on in France; although I’m told Francophone Canadians (for whom the invasion of English is possibly an even more keenly-felt issue than it is in France- check a map to see why!) still quite like it. The French language has also - so far - failed to come up with decent home-grown alternatives to such dubious imports as le parking, le camping and le weekend.
However, the news is not all bad for lovers of a ‘purer’ form of French. In fact, I’m blogging now because two marvellous terminological successes have just come to mind, both of which have achieved the not-inconsiderable feat of having entered common French usage despite their firm roots in the world of the Internet - a domain in which Anglo-Saxon words and phrases have traditionally ruled supreme. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…
Internaute
It’s time for the English-speaking peoples of the world to slap their heads in unison and say, why didn’t we think of that first? The best Anglophone attempt that comes to mind to describe a person browsing pages on the Web is a ’surfer’, but I think the best that can be said for that particular term is that it has gone on to give us an entertaining new twist on the phrase ‘silver surfer‘. Don’t tell anyone I said this, but perhaps we should petition the British government to pass a law mandating the introduction of the beautifully adventurous-sounding word ‘Internaut’ (yup, we can do without the final ‘e’, thanks) into the Queen’s English. Heaven knows we’ve, er, ‘liberated’ enough words from the French in the past; maybe they won’t notice?
Pourriel
And you thought the last one was clever… Not surprisingly, there are many in France who dislike the use of the English word ‘email’, and its semi-French bastard cousin mêle, and so it came to be that the French word courriel was invented (and frequently used by real French people, too) as a contraction of courrier électronique, meaning ‘electronic mail’. Fine, but how do you then describe an offshoot of this concept such as junk email? Enter stage left the wonderful word pourriel (pourri = rancid, corrupted, disgusting). The only thing that stops this from being absolutely perfect is the fact that as an English speaker, you’ll probably now never think of pot pourri in quite the same way again. Sorry about that.
