Pommes frites

Dan Goncharoff thegonch at GMAIL.COM
Sun Jan 22 18:47:31 UTC 2012


I have never eaten fast food in Paris, but when I moved to Germany, around
1991, french fries at Mickey Ds were called "pommes frites".

DanG


On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 1:41 PM, Jim Parish <jparish at siue.edu> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jim Parish <jparish at SIUE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Pommes frites
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Benjamin Barrett wrote:
> > The OED says that pommes frites are potato chips; the AHD doesn't have =
> > it.
> >
> > As Barry Popik points out in 2003 =
> > (
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=3Dind0303D&L=3DADS-L&P=3DR=
> > 3392&I=3D-3&X=3D5A86CF318F261388B0), the word has meant "French fries" =
> > at least since 1997, perhaps as a translation from Belgian French. There
> =
> > is a discussion at http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/544084 as to
> whether =
> > there is a difference between pommes frites and French fries (Wikipedia =
> > doesn't think so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pommes_frites).
> >
> For what it's worth, the H. G. Wells character in "Time After Time"
> (1979) uses the phrase during his
> first visit to McDonald's.
>
> Jim Parish
>
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