Catherine Field: Language police ignore textual chainsaw massacre of English

Words are picked up and brought into French because they sound trendy, or meet a need. Photo / Sarah Ivey

France is famous for defending its language.

It's not just at the United Nations and European Union, where French diplomats insist on the right to use French in official discourse, or even at the International Olympic Committee, which - to the outrage of Britain's tabloids- has insisted that posters and pageantry for the 2012 London Games be in French, an official IOC language, alongside English.

The biggest defensive activity is on the home front. The government appoints an official watchdog (www.dglf.culture.gouv.fr) to monitor the purity of French against English incursion.

A committee of language experts, La Commission Generale de Terminologie et de Neologie, hands down Zeus-like judgments in the Journal Officiel, the publication of legal record, on native words that should replace intruders.

For instance, one is urged to use logiciel rather than software, and courriel (a contraction of courrier electronique, or electronic mail) for email.

Then there's the Toubon Law, which enforces use of French in official publications and requires advertisements to provide a footnote translation in French of any foreign words they use. The name comes from a culture minister of the 1990s, Jacques Toubon, which explains why the legislation is sometimes mockingly called "la loi Allgood."

The ministry's squads of bureaucrats are enthusiastically backed by language vigilantes, whose websites pick over unworthy foreign words and lacerate any member of the elite suspected of kowtowing to the English invasion. Each year, a satirical award, Le Prix de la Carpette Anglaise (a "carpette" is a doormat, or someone spineless), is awarded to the worst offender.

But one thing these purists don't do is protect the English language from the French.

One of the curses of being a bilingual in France is seeing an English word take root and then being contorted, chewed up and ultimately given a chainsaw massacre by francophones.

Older imports from English - le weekend, le fair-play, le shampooing, un has-been, le happy-few and so on - have generally escaped this mutilation.

But they include oddities (le smoking, which means a dinner jacket, and le flipper, or pinball machine) as well as horrors such as un jean's (note the apostrophe) and le footing, or jogging.

The real acts of linguistic torture are occurring among newer words, especially those that have surfed into the vocabulary with computing, fashion, finance and music.

Words are picked up and brought into French because they sound trendy, or meet a need, and then undergo a transformation to suit local sounds and meanings. Sometimes they end up far from the original English. People who like to stay at home are said to faire du cocooning. If you like fine cooking, it's simple: Vous aimez le fooding. But if you're happy with a cheeseburger and fries, order le maxi best-of to get your fill.

Buy a DVD, and you may find a bonus disc, le making-of, sometimes spelt making-off - although only un looser (sic) would do this. In education, you study for le master (a master's degree). Give yourself a makeover and that's un relooking. Dress sexily, and you have gone for l'image total destroy.

Bankers talk about le burn-rate (how quickly a new business will go through its cash) and le triple bottom-line, and marketing folks can wax ecstatic over le travel retail - airport shops, to you and me. When a plane smashes into the ground, it's suffered un scrach.

Some of the biggest gobbledegook is in advertising. An online trader of second-hand electronic goods calls itself Le Happy Cash. But at least this is smarter than France Telecom's Live-Zoom, which left many people at a loss as to what it was ( a phone service).

A couple of years ago, a dreary supermarket chain called Attac decided to give itself a relooking and reinvent itself as Simply. An advertising campaign was set in gear - Be Happy, Be Simply! - and customers were offered a loyalty card with points called Happys.

Even the linguistic rottweilers of the Allgood Law were flummoxed over how to respond.