Émigrés: French Words That Turned English

by Richard Scholar

Overview

The fascinating history of French words that have entered the English language and the fertile but fraught relationship between English- and French-speaking cultures across the world

English has borrowed more words from French than from any other modern foreign language. French words and phrases—such as à la mode, ennui, naïveté and caprice—lend English a certain je-ne-sais-quoi that would otherwise elude the language. Richard Scholar examines the continuing history of untranslated French words in English and asks what these words reveal about the fertile but fraught relationship that England and France have long shared and that now entangles English- and French-speaking cultures all over the world.

Émigrés demonstrates that French borrowings have, over the centuries, “turned” English in more ways than one. From the seventeenth-century polymath John Evelyn’s complaint that English lacks “words that do so fully express” the French ennui and naïveté, to George W. Bush’s purported claim that “the French don’t have a word for entrepreneur,” this unique history of English argues that French words have offered more than the mere seasoning of the occasional mot juste. They have established themselves as “creolizing keywords” that both connect English speakers to—and separate them from—French. Moving from the realms of opera to ice cream, the book shows how migrant French words are never the same again for having ventured abroad, and how they complete English by reminding us that it is fundamentally incomplete.

At a moment of resurgent nationalism in the English-speaking world, Émigrés invites native Anglophone readers to consider how much we owe the French language and why so many of us remain ambivalent about the migrants in our midst.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691190327
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	08/18/2020
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Richard Scholar is Professor of French at Durham University. His books include The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe: Encounters with a Certain Something and Montaigne and the Art of Free-Thinking.

Table of Contents

Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush 1

Part I Mixings

Chapter 1 French À la Mode 15

Chapter 2 Modes of English 42

Chapter 3 Creolizing Keywords 67

Part II Migrations

Chapter 4 Naïveté 99

Chapter 5 Ennui 130

Chapter 6 Caprice 165

Migrants in Our Midst 205

Acknowledgements 215

Notes 219

References 231

Index 243

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"At once fascinating, entertaining and insightful, Richard Scholar's Émigrés reveals the power of language as a source of cultural diversity and tolerance in an age of resurgent nationalism. A necessary and important book to help break down borders in our minds and societies."—Roman Krznaric, author of The Good Ancestor and Empathy

“This is a beautiful piece of work—and a book we need. Without relation there is no living, the living is relation, every living language is relation.”—Patrick Chamoiseau, author of Migrant Brothers and Texaco

“This is a marvelous book. Richard Scholar provides fresh insight everywhere.”—Roland Greene, Stanford University

“This is a fascinating and compelling book, which I read with great pleasure.”—Alexis Tadié, Sorbonne University

Editorial Reviews

08/10/2020

Scholar, Durham University professor, reflects thoughtfully and sometimes surprisingly on the use of French words in English. He takes as his jumping-off point the rise of the term “à la mode” during the 17th-century English Restoration to signal “fashionability,” as demonstrated by John Dryden’s comedy Marriage À-la Mode. Scholar singles out a scene in the play in which the upper-class heroine, in search of chic new French words with which to impress her friends, receives a laundry list of terms from her maid; Scholar notes some have passed into common English parlance since the play’s 1673 premiere, while others are still exclusively French. He devotes a chapter to each of the three words in the former category, naivete, ennui, and caprice. The 1809 novel Ennui is shown as an example of how writers from disempowered populations, such as author Maria Edgeworth’s native Ireland, have drawn on the “international prestige and analytic power of French language and literary culture,” while John le Carré’s 1971 departure from the spy genre, The Naive and Sentimental Lover, is related to le Carré’s affinity for Continental Europe. Finally, Richard Strauss’s opera Capriccio is used to show how, in German as well as in English, “caprice” and the related Italian capriccio feature “as twinned examples of a culture of creativity.” Given the current interest in immigration, Scholar’s book on immigrant words is erudite, witty, and surprisingly timely. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"Who needs ennui when we have old-fashioned boredom? . . . Scholar’s émigrés often manage to be posh and phoney at the same time, while still carrying a kind of precision it would be hard to find without them. . . . [In Émigrés] words have historical lives and tell us stories we may not know how to hear."—-Michael Wood, London Review of Books

From the Publisher

"Like the émigré lexical items themselves, Emigrés crackles with hidden energy and is worth serious study."

Choice Reviews

2020-04-26
A scholarly account of the numerous French words that have entered and remained in the English language.

Scholar, a professor of French who has written a book on Montaigne, among other subjects, returns with a brief, focused account of some specific changes and adaptations in English. For the author, a key text is Marriage Á-la-Mode, a 1673 play by John Dryden that contains numerous instances of characters employing French and effectively “satirized French with a forked tongue.” Although Scholar acknowledges that the Norman invasion of 1066 certainly began the transformation process, it is Dryden’s play, he believes, that accelerated the move and made many aware of the various social, cultural, and class meanings of French-into-English words. Throughout, the author notes the ambivalence of English speakers about French. Does employing French indicate class, cultivation, and education? Or elitism? All of the above, argues Scholar, who also shows how the transference has affected art, music, and literature (he includes some reproductions of relevant paintings, such as Walter Richard Sickert’s Ennui (1917-1918). The latter half of the text illustrates the general pattern by examining three specific words: “naïveté,” “ennui,” and “caprice.” Scholar explores the history of each word—sometimes displaying a denseness and academic specificity that will dissuade general readers—and describes how it first arrived and how writers and other artists have employed it, from earlier centuries to the present. For the most part, the author alludes to writers and other artists whose names are generally well known, including John Le Carré, Virginia Woolf, William Shakespeare, and Richard Strauss. But others will ring bells only with the cognoscenti. The author ends his volume with some reflections on emigration and immigration, discussing Donald Trump, Brexit, and the current hostile and divided political climate.

A well-researched, convincing account of how our language has welcomed foreign words—but not always their native speakers.

Kirkus Reviews

"Like the émigré lexical items themselves, Emigrés crackles with hidden energy and is worth serious study."

Choice