CHAPTER X.
HIGH-LIFE ANGLO-FRENCH GIBBERISH AS USED IN FRANCE AND IN ENGLAND.
Languages have this in common with many mortals; when they borrow they do not return. This is perhaps a happy thing, for when borrowed words do get returned, good Heavens! what a state they come home in!
We thought we were doing a fine thing in taking the words ticket, jockey, budget, tunnel, fashion from the English. They are, however, but French words mutilated, and there is not much to be proud of in reacquiring them. The English had borrowed of us étiqueter, jacquet (petit Jacques), bougette (the king's privy purse), façon. Better they had kept them. Up to the nineteenth century, it was by reason of war and conquest that both conquerors and conquered saw their vocabularies invaded by foreign words; but is it not strange that in the nineteenth century, the century of civilization, so-called, peace between England and France should bring about such a disastrous result?
Formerly we used to déjeuner.
Nous avons changé tout cela; nowadays nous lunchons. Nous lunchons! What a barbarous mouthful, is it not?
The word déjeuner signifying "to cease fasting," or, as the English say, "to breakfast," it is wrongly used in speaking of a second repast. Déjeuner is, therefore, irrational; but is this any excuse for making ourselves grotesque?
But, my dear compatriots, we are avenged. I read in the London Standard:
"Prince Albert Victor was yesterday admitted to the freedom of the City of London.... The royal party and a large company of invited guests were afterward entertained at a déjeuner in the Guildhall, the Lord Mayor presiding."
Now that the French lunch, the English will déjeuner more than ever, of course.