What have the French ever done for us?
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In 1066 the invading Norman French arrived at Hastings, on the southern coast of England. After a short battle, they took over the whole country. Subsequent attempts to replicate this feat by Señor Philip of Spain and Herr Hitler of Germany came to naught.
We might speculate that some of the doughty, resolute spirit that has repelled other invaders for close to a millennium derives from the intermingling of the nuanced and sophisticated character of Norman French with the blunt and direct monosyllabism of Anglo-Saxon.
What we can say with a fair measure of certainty is that French brought with it a dose of class consciousness that’s never really left the English language. This is unsurprising when you consider that the invaders simply made French the official language of Church, Law and State. Any social advancement would therefore have to be done in French.
To this day, the simplicity and sturdiness of Anglo-Saxon words are often neglected in favour of their more elaborate French/Latinate cognates (see? I do it all the time). If you detect a pretentious note in your writing, the culprit will often be a long word that sneaked in from France.
The class consciousness is more obvious when you think of words like ‘villain’, which is derived from ‘villein’ – a French word for ‘villager’ that now describes a shady character best avoided, which was clearly the opinion of the conquering French nobility towards their grubby English underlings.
Over time the origins of such words become obscured, but it’s instructive to remember that loaded terminology extends back a lot further than the dawn of the age of ‘political correctness’ in the 1980s.
