ÉMIGRÉS

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 Á-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: “naïveté,” “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 Carré, 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.