[Ads-l] Fwd: Now I Know: What's So French About the F-Word?

Wed Oct 23 21:15:49 UTC 2019

I had heard that many of our one syllable rude words (c*nt, c*ck, sh*t etc,
though f*ck has a whole sea of stories about it - somewhere on
https://stronglang.wordpress.com/
I'm sure) were Anglo-Saxon/Norman counterparts to the fancier French
influenced (vagina, penis, er, excrement, maybe?) versions; the upper class
used the fancier terms, hoi poloi used the short ones.  Which sort of make
"pardon my French" be a way of apologizing for being snooty or a backhanded
snooty way of not being common.

On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 6:31 AM Dan Lewis <dan at nowiknow.com> wrote:

> And do little kids "oui oui"?
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> *Hi! Thanks to reader Henry R. for sharing this one. -- Dan*
>   What's So French About the F-Word?
> In 1972, the late, great comedian George Carlin debuted a monologue titled
> "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television." The seven words are also
> seven words you can't say in this email newsletter (with a one-time
> exception, but you'll have to do Google search for that one, sorry), so I
> won't be listing them here. While Carlin's title wasn't quite accurate --
> those seven words weren't specifically banned from TV broadcasts -- the
> general rule is correct: one doesn't use those seven words or a litany of
> others in polite company.
>
> But if you do? You may want to apologize. And if you do, there's a decent
> chance you might do say by saying "pardon my French." Take a look at the
> graph below; it shows the language used in books from the last century or
> so. (It's from Google's Ngram Viewer, which you can play around with here
> <https://nowiknow.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2889002ad89d45ca21f50ba46&id=6d94a9e1d2&e=33dbfa3b8f>.)
> Starting in the 1970s, "pardon my French" been an increasingly popular way
> to ask others to excuse your uncouth language. (Okay, it's leveled off over
> the past few years, but close enough.)
> But of the seven words -- again, I'm not going to recite them -- none of
> them are French. Neither are some of the more innocuous swear words like,
> uh, what "BS" stands for. So, where did the phrase come from?
>
> It turns out, it's because people were ashamed of being snobs.
>
> The first modern use of "pardon my French" -- actually, "excuse my
> French," but the same idea -- comes from an 1831 book titled "The Twelfth
> Night" by Baron Karl von Milte. Despite the author's Germanic name, the
> book is almost entirely in English. The exception -- well, the relevant
> exception -- is the word "*embonpoint*" -- a French word meaning "plump"
> or "overweight." Specifically, one of the characters says the following
> <https://nowiknow.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2889002ad89d45ca21f50ba46&id=25a85d8f58&e=33dbfa3b8f>:
>
>
> Bless me, how fat you are grown!--absolutely as round as a ball:-- you
> will soon be as *embonpoint* (excuse my French) as your poor dear father,
> the major.
>
> It's an odd phrase, right? The speaker says "excuse my French" literally,
> as "*embonpoint*" isn't a curse word, it's just a regular old French
> word. Further, while the speaker apologizes, he's not apologizing for
> calling the other guy fat. He apologizes for using a French word to levy
> the insult. It's a strange thing to apologize for -- until you look into
> the history of it.
>
> As Reader's Digest notes
> <https://nowiknow.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2889002ad89d45ca21f50ba46&id=6b4b780697&e=33dbfa3b8f>,
> when William the Conqueror seized control of England, he installed a number
> of French-speaking Normans into leadership roles, and for generations
> afterward, much of the English nobility was bilingual, English and French.
> Language divided the elite from the commoners; the former would pepper
> French phrases into their speech but the latter could rarely understand the
> non-English words. And that caused division. As Mental Floss explains
> <https://nowiknow.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2889002ad89d45ca21f50ba46&id=2af03de1ae&e=33dbfa3b8f>, "English
> speakers dropped French words or phrases into conversation—whether to
> display their culture, refinement or social class, or because sometimes
> only a French phrase has that certain *je ne sais quoi*—and then
> apologized for it if the listener wasn’t familiar with the word or didn’t
> speak the language." In effect, the speaker was offering an empty apology
> for using language which was impolite.
>
> Over time, that more general use -- "sorry for using language
> inappropriate for the social setting, even though I'm not really sorry" --
> broadened to include swear words. And as it became increasingly okay to use
> foreign phrases in everyday language, the original reason to apologize for
> using French words in English speech dissipated.
>
> No matter how you cut it, though, there's nothing actually French about
> the F-word or Carlin's six other favorites.
>
> ------------------------------
>
>
>
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> ------------------------------
> *Bonus fact*: When Carlin first performed his "Seven Words" monologue,
> there were no laws a no major court rulings which specifically barred the
> use of those words, but TV networks self-censored and rarely, if ever,
> broadcast similar profanity. Carlin, however, changed that -- and not in
> his favor. In 1973, WBAI, a New York-based FM radio station, aired part of
> Carlin's routine, prompting complaints to the FCC. The FCC reprimanded the
> station but its owners sued, claiming that the First Amendment gave the
> station *carte blanche* (pardon my French) to broadcast whatever,
> whenever. By a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court disagreed
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> *From the Archives*: Thomas the Tank Engine’s Unlikely Friend
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> The famous train is not related to the above... or is it?
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