Émigrés

June 1, 2020
A scholarly account of the numerous French words that have entered and remained in the English language. Scholar, a professor of French who has written a book on Montaigne, among other subjects, returns with a brief, focused account of some specific changes and adaptations in English. For the author, a key text is Marriage �-la-Mode, a 1673 play by John Dryden that contains numerous instances of characters employing French and effectively "satirized French with a forked tongue." Although Scholar acknowledges that the Norman invasion of 1066 certainly began the transformation process, it is Dryden's play, he believes, that accelerated the move and made many aware of the various social, cultural, and class meanings of French-into-English words. Throughout, the author notes the ambivalence of English speakers about French. Does employing French indicate class, cultivation, and education? Or elitism? All of the above, argues Scholar, who also shows how the transference has affected art, music, and literature (he includes some reproductions of relevant paintings, such as Walter Richard Sickert's Ennui (1917-1918). The latter half of the text illustrates the general pattern by examining three specific words: "na�vet�," "ennui," and "caprice." Scholar explores the history of each word--sometimes displaying a denseness and academic specificity that will dissuade general readers--and describes how it first arrived and how writers and other artists have employed it, from earlier centuries to the present. For the most part, the author alludes to writers and other artists whose names are generally well known, including John Le Carr�, Virginia Woolf, William Shakespeare, and Richard Strauss. But others will ring bells only with the cognoscenti. The author ends his volume with some reflections on emigration and immigration, discussing Donald Trump, Brexit, and the current hostile and divided political climate. A well-researched, convincing account of how our language has welcomed foreign words--but not always their native speakers.

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August 10, 2020
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.