Le Fooding; Ghoul Factor

[Robert Kelly]

Fooding may be a nonce-coinage for France in '99 -- but the same word was
to be seen on many a little roadside restaurant in India when I travelled
there in 1983.  It was evidently prompted by lodging, since the most
prominent sign would typically say FOODING & LODGING.

Do we have here the influence of the zillions of French hippies who
scoured Rishikesh and the foothills in the 1970s and 80s, now turned into
the entrepreneurs of 2001?

RK

==================================================
Robert Kelly
The Writing Program
MSC 12611
Bard College
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Annandale-on-Hudson NY 12504
Voice Mail: 845-758-7205
kelly at bard.edu

On Fri, 9 Feb 2001, James A. Landau wrote:

> In a message dated 02/09/2001 1:58:34 PM Eastern Standard Time,
> Bapopik at AOL.COM writes:
>
> >   From the WALL STREET JOURNAL, 9 February 2001, pg. W11, col. 1:
> >
> >  _All the Rage in Paris?  Le Fooding_
> >  by Jacqueline Friedrich
> >     PARIS--FOODING IS the buzzword of the moment here.  Merging the English
> > words for food and feeling into a French noun, it was coined in early '99
> by
> > Alexandre Cammas in the hip Parisian magazine Nova.  And ever since, _le
> > fooding_ has been on every Paris gastronome's lips as well as on food-
> > oriented pages from Elle to the Air France in-flight magazine. (...)
> >
>
> I have done zero research on the following topic and am wondering if anyone
> has examined it:
>
> For years the French have been complaining about "Franglais" (the use of
> English words in French.)  But Franglais has been around long enough that one
> might expect it to develop some words of its own that are in neither French
> or English.  "Fooding"---certainly not an English word---is a good example.
> Another one is Franglais "le park" for parking lot---the English noun "park"
> means "le parc".
>
>
> >  --------------------------------------------------------
> >  GHOUL FACTOR
> >
> >     From the WALL STREET JOURNAL, 9 February 2001, pg. W8, col. 6:
> >
> >  _"The value will soar when the artist passes away."_  A creepy but
> > troublingly common sales pitch, the tendency to bet on aging artists is a
> > strategy so common it has inspired its own name--the "ghoul factor"--and a "
> > Seinfeld" episode.  But would-be ghouls be warned: The math doesn't work
> >
>
> See Mark Twain's short story "Is He Living Or Is He Dead?"
> (see for example Charles Neider ed _The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain_
> pp 307-314)
>
>       - James A. Landau
>