French Fancificaton

One of my happiest (and weirdest) memories from all of middle school comes from Mrs. Moorhead’s French class. In order to learn about French culture, some fresh croissants were brought in for us kids to enjoy.

I don’t think croissants were new to me, exactly—people were already turning them into breakfast sandwiches, and you could probably get some kind of cheap, instant croissants in the grocery store, but these were brought in fresh, and meant to be authentic.

I really wanted to savor it, but I was new to eating rich, fancy foods, and so I figured maximizing my butter-to-bread ratio was a key. Naturally, I put a lot of butter on my croissant.

Mrs. Moorhead commented something to the effect of wow, Andrew—do you want a little croissant with your butter? Once again, middle school offered me the chance to learn about sarcasm, but this time through the lens of one of my teachers.

Now, don’t get me wrong—this croissant was probably a decent baked good from a local (South Carolina, 1987ish) bakery. Why did I lose my mind over this treat?

I had fallen into the trap of French fancification: throw a French name on something, and English speakers will think it’s fancy. Ooh, la la!

While this might sound like a modern marketing gimmick, we have to go all the way back to the start of the last millennium to uncover its origins: the Norman Invasion of England in 1066.

England had been conquered by people who did not speak English. Suddenly, French was the language of the court, and aspiring fancy people everywhere started trying to learn a little French. The closer to the royal family you were, the more likely you were to parle francais.

Supper was for poor people, while the sophisticated (French) had diner (eventually dinner). Anglo-Saxon commoners spoke of eating cow and pig, while their sophisticated counterparts ate beef and porc. While you might ask about something in plain English, you’d inquire about it if you wanted everyone around to know how important you were.

The 1985 movie Better Off Dead does a great job of showing how this idea pervades English-speaking culture, even a thousand years after that invasion. Notice how the host of the dinner pronounces French, so you can tell how fancy she is:

Fronch fries! I love it. Even though the world has changed a lot over the last forty years since this movie and my butter with a side of croissant, one thing that has remained consistent is our playful adaptation of French words into English.

Nowadays, some memes are smart enough to be self-referential. The 2010s saw the use of the word “le” being slapped in front of unexpected words, so the pairing implied sophistication. However, the trope also makes fun of us, doesn’t it?

Le facepalm. I haven’t set this up as well as I should have.

When I got that croissant in Fronch class, I genuinely felt as though I was getting something fancy. Le fancy croissant?

Today, though, the le in front of things lets you know how aware we are of French fancification itself. We let everyone see that there is nobody behind the curtain, and that language is just language. We can make it seem fancy (such as by slapping a fanciful le in front of a word), but le etymology tells the real story.