Émigrés: French Words That Turned English

Scholar, Durham University professor, reflects thoughtfully and sometimes surprisingly on the use of French words in English. He takes as his jumping-off point the rise of the term “à la mode” during the 17th-century English Restoration to signal “fashionability,” as demonstrated by John Dryden’s comedy Marriage À-la Mode. Scholar singles out a scene in the play in which the upper-class heroine, in search of chic new French words with which to impress her friends, receives a laundry list of terms from her maid; Scholar notes some have passed into common English parlance since the play’s 1673 premiere, while others are still exclusively French. He devotes a chapter to each of the three words in the former category, naivete, ennui, and caprice. The 1809 novel Ennui is shown as an example of how writers from disempowered populations, such as author Maria Edgeworth’s native Ireland, have drawn on the “international prestige and analytic power of French language and literary culture,” while John le Carré’s 1971 departure from the spy genre, The Naive and Sentimental Lover, is related to le Carré’s affinity for Continental Europe. Finally, Richard Strauss’s opera Capriccio is used to show how, in German as well as in English, “caprice” and the related Italian capriccio feature “as twinned examples of a culture of creativity.” Given the current interest in immigration, Scholar’s book on immigrant words is erudite, witty, and surprisingly timely. (Aug.)