On his book Émigrés: French Words That Turned English
Cover Interview of July 14, 2021
In a nutshell
George W. Bush is said to have claimed that “the problem
with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur.” Whether or
not it is true, that anecdote illustrates a deeper truth, which is that many in
the English-speaking world turn to French more than they would like to think
they do.
English has borrowed more words from French than from any
other modern foreign language. Many borrowings from French have been seamlessly
absorbed into English, like the word entrepreneur. They’ve become part
of the fixtures and fittings. Other French borrowings in English leave no room
for confusion about their provenance. They assert their identity as French
migrants—as émigrés. Think of phrases like je ne sais quoi and à
la mode. Phrases such as these and words like naïveté, ennui,
and caprice have been widely available in English since the later part
of the seventeenth century. They have struck many speakers and writers of
English as being uniquely expressive. What role, I wanted to ask, have émigrés played
in the making of modern English as it has developed over centuries and as it is
spoken and written all over the world today?
Émigrés is my answer to that question.
The book explores the emergence in Restoration English of
particular émigré words and phrases. It traces the later trajectories of
these words across the English-speaking world. It reveals how such émigrés inspire
receptivity in some Anglophones, resistance in others, and ambivalence in most.
It shows how they can occasion extraordinary creativity even as they remain
visibly caught up in a power relation between neighboring cultures—English- and
French-speaking—that is never perceived as equal. Moving from opera to ice
cream, the book shows how migrant French words are never the same again for
having ventured abroad, and how they take on new lives in the material and
visual cultures of the English-speaking world.
French migrant words fascinate me as a writer above all, perhaps,
because they seem to complete English as a language by elegantly recalling its
fundamental incompleteness. They reveal its relation to the languages that
surround it. They mark out things it cannot immediately express while also
creating for it new possibilities of expression. And it is above all in the
myriad of practices we call literature that we see these possibilities of
expression variously realized.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
George W. Bush is said to have claimed that “the problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur.” Whether or not it is true, that anecdote illustrates a deeper truth, which is that many in the English-speaking world turn to French more than they would like to think they do.
English has borrowed more words from French than from any other modern foreign language. Many borrowings from French have been seamlessly absorbed into English, like the word entrepreneur. They’ve become part of the fixtures and fittings. Other French borrowings in English leave no room for confusion about their provenance. They assert their identity as French migrants—as émigrés. Think of phrases like je ne sais quoi and à la mode. Phrases such as these and words like naïveté, ennui, and caprice have been widely available in English since the later part of the seventeenth century. They have struck many speakers and writers of English as being uniquely expressive. What role, I wanted to ask, have émigrés played in the making of modern English as it has developed over centuries and as it is spoken and written all over the world today?
Émigrés is my answer to that question.
The book explores the emergence in Restoration English of particular émigré words and phrases. It traces the later trajectories of these words across the English-speaking world. It reveals how such émigrés inspire receptivity in some Anglophones, resistance in others, and ambivalence in most. It shows how they can occasion extraordinary creativity even as they remain visibly caught up in a power relation between neighboring cultures—English- and French-speaking—that is never perceived as equal. Moving from opera to ice cream, the book shows how migrant French words are never the same again for having ventured abroad, and how they take on new lives in the material and visual cultures of the English-speaking world.
French migrant words fascinate me as a writer above all, perhaps, because they seem to complete English as a language by elegantly recalling its fundamental incompleteness. They reveal its relation to the languages that surround it. They mark out things it cannot immediately express while also creating for it new possibilities of expression. And it is above all in the myriad of practices we call literature that we see these possibilities of expression variously realized.