French leave

Last updated
Article from the December 29, 1825 edition of the National Gazette and Literary Register published in Philadelphia reporting that Missouri Senator "Col. Palmer (Martin Parmer) is said to have taken French leave and gone to Texas". Martin Parmer - Gone to Texas.jpg
Article from the December 29, 1825 edition of the National Gazette and Literary Register published in Philadelphia reporting that Missouri Senator "Col. Palmer (Martin Parmer) is said to have taken French leave and gone to Texas".

A French leave, sometimes French exit, Irish goodbye or Irish exit, is a departure from a location or event without informing others or without seeking approval. [1] Examples include relatively innocuous acts such as leaving a party without bidding farewell in order to avoid disturbing or upsetting the host, or more problematic acts such as a soldier leaving his post without authorization. [2]

Contents

The first attestation of the phrase in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1751, a time when the English and French cultures were heavily interlinked.

In French, the equivalent phrase is filer à l'anglaise ("to leave English style") [3] and seems to date from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. [4]

First usage

The Oxford English Dictionary records: "the custom (in the 18th century prevalent in France and sometimes imitated in England) of going away from a reception, etc. without taking leave of the host or hostess. Hence, jocularly, to take French leave is to go away, or do anything, without permission or notice."

James Boswell's journal for November 15, 1762 mentions his friend not seeing him off on his leaving Scotland "... as Cairnie told me that people never took leave in France, I made the thing sit pretty easy." [5]

In Canada and the United States, the expression Irish goodbye is also used. [6]

Military usage

The term is sometimes used to mean the act of leisurely absence from a military unit. [7] This comes from the rich history of Franco-English conflict; as Spain has a similar saying concerning the French (despedida a la francesa), it may have come from the Napoleonic campaign in the Iberian Peninsula which pitted the French against an Anglo-Portuguese and Spanish alliance.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rhyming slang</span> Any system of slang in which a word is replaced with a phrase that rhymes with it

Rhyming slang is a form of slang word construction in the English language. It is especially prevalent among Cockneys in England, and was first used in the early 19th century in the East End of London; hence its alternative name, Cockney rhyming slang. In the US, especially the criminal underworld of the West Coast between 1880 and 1920, rhyming slang has sometimes been known as Australian slang.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hiberno-English</span> English dialects native to Ireland

Hiberno-English or Irish English (IrE), also formerly sometimes called Anglo-Irish, is the set of English dialects native to the island of Ireland, including both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Infinitive is a linguistics term for certain verb forms existing in many languages, most often used as non-finite verbs. As with many linguistic concepts, there is not a single definition applicable to all languages. The name is derived from Late Latin [modus] infinitivus, a derivative of infinitus meaning "unlimited".

A verb is a word that in syntax generally conveys an action, an occurrence, or a state of being. In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive. In many languages, verbs are inflected to encode tense, aspect, mood, and voice. A verb may also agree with the person, gender or number of some of its arguments, such as its subject, or object. Verbs have tenses: present, to indicate that an action is being carried out; past, to indicate that an action has been done; future, to indicate that an action will be done.

In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, “to calque” means to borrow a word or phrase from another language while translating its components, so as to create a new lexeme in the target language. For instance, the English word "skyscraper" has been calqued in dozens of other languages, combining words for "sky" and "scrape" in each language, as for example, German: Wolkenkratzer, Portuguese: Arranha-céu, Turkish: Gökdelen. Another notable example is the Latin weekday names, which came to be associated by ancient Germanic speakers with their own gods following a practice known as interpretatio germanica: the Latin "Day of Mercury", Mercurii dies, was borrowed into Late Proto-Germanic as the "Day of Wōđanaz" (Wodanesdag), which became Wōdnesdæg in Old English, then "Wednesday" in Modern English.

Adpositions are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations or mark various semantic roles. The most common adpositions are prepositions and postpositions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robe</span> Loose-fitting outer garment, worn in many historical periods and contexts

A robe is a loose-fitting outer garment. Unlike garments described as capes or cloaks, robes usually have sleeves. The English word robe derives from Middle English robe ("garment"), borrowed from Old French robe, itself taken from the Frankish word *rouba, and is related to the word rob.

In linguistics, verb-framing and satellite-framing are typological descriptions of a way that verb phrases in a language can describe the path of motion or the manner of motion, respectively. Some languages make this distinction and others do not.

Ciao is an informal salutation in the Italian language that is used for both "hello" and "goodbye".

A contronym, contranym or autantonym is a word with two meanings that are opposite each other. For example, the word cleave can mean "to cut apart" or "to bind together". This feature is also called enantiosemy, enantionymy, antilogy or autantonymy. An enantiosemic term is by definition polysemic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Norman language</span> Romance language of Northwest France

Norman or Norman French is a Romance language which can be classified as a langue d'oïl, which also includes French, Picard and Walloon. The name "Norman French" is sometimes used to describe not only the Norman language, but also the administrative languages of Anglo-Norman and Law French used in England. For the most part, the written forms of Norman and modern French are mutually intelligible. This intelligibility was largely caused by the Norman language's planned adaptation to French orthography.

Folk etymology – also known as (generative) popular etymology, analogical reformation, (morphological)reanalysis and etymological reinterpretation – is a change in a word or phrase resulting from the replacement of an unfamiliar form by a more familiar one through popular usage. The form or the meaning of an archaic, foreign, or otherwise unfamiliar word is reinterpreted as resembling more familiar words or morphemes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Madeleine (cake)</span> Small sponge cake with a distinctive shell-like shape

The madeleine or petite madeleine is a traditional small cake from Commercy and Liverdun, two communes of the Lorraine region in northeastern France.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American and British English spelling differences</span> Comparison between U.S. and UK English spelling

Despite the various English dialects spoken from country to country and within different regions of the same country, there are only slight regional variations in English orthography, the two most notable variations being British and American spelling. Many of the differences between American and British/English in the Commonwealth of Nations date back to a time before spelling standards were developed. For instance, some spellings seen as "American" today were once commonly used in Britain, and some spellings seen as "British" were once commonly used in the United States.

In morphology and lexicography, a lemma is the canonical form, dictionary form, or citation form of a set of word forms. In English, for example, break, breaks, broke, broken and breaking are forms of the same lexeme, with break as the lemma by which they are indexed. Lexeme, in this context, refers to the set of all the inflected or alternating forms in the paradigm of a single word, and lemma refers to the particular form that is chosen by convention to represent the lexeme. Lemmas have special significance in highly inflected languages such as Arabic, Turkish, and Russian. The process of determining the lemma for a given lexeme is called lemmatisation. The lemma can be viewed as the chief of the principal parts, although lemmatisation is at least partly arbitrary.

"Pardon my French" or "Excuse my French" is a common English language phrase ostensibly disguising profanity as words from the French language. The phrase is uttered in an attempt to excuse the user of profanity, swearing, or curses in the presence of those offended by it, under the pretense of the words being part of a foreign language.

Silver service is a method of food service at the table, with the waiter transferring food from a serving dish to the guest's plate, always from the left. It is performed by a waiter using service forks and spoons from the diner's left. In France, it appears to be now known as service à l'anglaise, although historically that meant something else, with the hostess serving out the soup at one end of the table, and later the host carving a joint of meat at the other end, and diners serving themselves with other dishes present.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cajun English</span> Dialect of English

Cajun English, or Cajun Vernacular English, is a dialect of American English spoken by Cajuns living in Southern Louisiana. Cajun English is significantly influenced by Louisiana French, the historical language of the Cajun people, a subset of Louisiana Creoles — although many today prefer not to identify as such — who descend largely from the Acadian people expelled from the Maritime provinces during Le Grand Dérangement.

A postpositive adjective or postnominal adjective is an adjective that is placed after the noun or pronoun that it modifies, as in noun phrases such as attorney general, queen regnant, or all matters financial. This contrasts with prepositive adjectives, which come before the noun or pronoun, as in noun phrases such as red rose, lucky contestant, or busy bees.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alumni</span> Graduate of a school

Alumni are former students or graduates of a school, college, or university. The feminine plural alumnae is sometimes used for groups of women, and alums or alumns as gender-neutral alternatives. The word comes from Latin, meaning nurslings, pupils or foster children, derived from alere "to nourish".

References

  1. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (Millennium Edition; London: Cassell, 1999)
  2. Parkinson, Judy (2000). From Hue & Cry to Humble Pie. Michael O'Mara Books. p. 80. ISBN   978-0-7607-3581-7.
  3. Anu Garg's A.Word.A.Day, September 8, 2008. http://wordsmith.org/words/chinese_puzzle.html
  4. "Filer à l'anglaise". Francparler. Retrieved September 7, 2012.
  5. Pottle, Frederick A., ed. (1950). Boswell's London Journal. McGraw-Hill. p. 40. ISBN   0-07-006603-5.
  6. Seth Stevenson (3 July 2013). "Don't say goodbye". Slate.com.
  7. For the usage, see for example the war memoirs of Commandant Ludwig Krause 1899–1900, Cape Town 1996, p. 65.