English has borrowed more words from French than from any other modern foreign language. French words and phrases—such as à la mode, ennui, naïveté and caprice—lend English a certain je-ne-sais-quoi that would otherwise elude the language.
Richard Scholar examines the continuing history of untranslated French words in English and asks what these words reveal about the fertile but fraught relationship that England and France have long shared and that now entangles English— and French-speaking cultures all over the world.
Émigrés demonstrates that French borrowings have, over the centuries, “turned” English in more ways than one. From the 17th-century polymath John Evelyn’s complaint that English lacks “words that do so fully express” the French ennui and naïveté, to George W. Bush’s purported claim that “the French don’t have a word for entrepreneur,” this unique history of English argues that French words have offered more than the mere seasoning of the occasional mot juste.
