Say Chic

Even if you don’t speak French, chances are your French vocabulary is pretty impressive whether you know it or not.

“Have you updated your résumé recently?”

“Would you like a little mayonnaise on that sandwich?”

“Maybe after your stage début at the cabaret you and your chic brunette date can have a rendezvous at the local restaurant.”

Jeremy Leven, the novelist and screenwriter behind Playing for Keeps, The Legend of Bagger Vance and The Notebook, and co-author Françoise Blanchard have teamed up to bring American readers an amusing confection in the form of two books, Say Chic and A Short Guide to Foodie French. Both explore the proliferation of French phrases and words in the modern English language.

A longtime Francophile, Leven has lived part-time in the 7th arrondissement for years; he now divides his time between Paris, Connecticut and Los Angeles, and it is in America that he has noticed the preponderance of French in popular culture, be it on restaurant menus, supermarket shelves or in department stores. “The word ‘stringbean’,” he remarks wryly, “has completely disappeared from the American menu. Today, if you want stringbeans in a restaurant, you have to ask for haricot verts.”

Be that as it may, the French influence on the English language goes deeper than simply replacing words to add a little je ne sais quoi to restaurant menus. The French have the Académie Française, a government-run organization dedicated to the preservation of the French language (and the body that changed the word for “computer mouse” from souris to point-locateur.) The English language has no comparable advocate, which makes it fairly easy for words from other languages to drift into the vernacular. And then there are those words in French that simply cannot be translated into English. How do you translate panache? After all, it simply means panache.

So if you are one of those Francophiles who just adores wordplay (don’t forget, no one loves jeux de mots more than the French) pick up Leven and Blanchard’s books and learn to pepper your conversations with  all the joie de vivre that can only come from a little franglais.

Françoise Blanchard & Jeremy Leven, A Short Guide to Foodie French…With a Touch of Salt. Diateino 2008

Françoise Blanchard & Jeremy Leven, Say Chic: A Collection of French Words We Can’t Live Without. Scribner 2007