Peter Archer - 500 Foreign Words and Phrases You Should Know to Sound Smart. Terms to Demonstrate Your Savoir Faire, Chutzpah, and Bravado

500
Foreign
WORDS &
PHRASES
You Should Know to
SOUND
SMART

TERMS TO DEMONSTRATE
YOUR SAVOIR FAIRE,
CHUTZPAH, AND BRAVADO

Peter Archer &
Linda Archer, PhD

For Jocelyn and Tim
Amor vincit omnia.

Thanks to Meredith OHayre and Katie Corcoran Lytle for their considerable support and assistance and to all the other great people at Adams Media. Especially, thanks to Karen Cooper for inviting us to write this book.

When, in 1883, Emma Lazarus penned her sonnet The New Colossus, she perhaps did not anticipate what a can of worms she was opening up.

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

And they came. In the last decades of the nineteenth century and the opening years of the twentieth, millions arrived in America, having made the long journey from Europe in search of a brighter future. They brought with them the clothes on their backs and little elsesave their languages. From Hester Street in Manhattan to the Haymarket in Chicago, a patois of foreign words and phrases filled the air.

The result, not surprisingly, was that American English grew infinitely richer, a stew of foreign words and phrases tossed together and poured out over the land. While most of the immigrants in time learned the language of their adopted country, their linguistic legacy remained.

English, of course, has always borrowed from other tongues. Britain, in the first century A.D. , became a province of the Roman Empire, and thus the upper classesas well as many common peoplewere fluent in Latin. When the Romans retreated in the fourth century to deal unsuccessfully with the barbarian hordes threatening the Eternal City, they were replaced by invading Germanic tribesthe Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, and others. Thus over the following centuries the remnants of Latin merged with Germanic/Scandinavian languages, often carried across the North Sea on the dragon prows of Viking longboats. From this emerged Anglo-Saxon, the language of Beowulf and the early kings of Britain.

It might have remained so if William of Normandy hadnt beaten the snot out of Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The invading Normans were French-speaking (that is, they spoke an early form of French), and since they were now the ruling class of England, Norman French became the tongue of the upper classes. By the time Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales in the late fourteenth century, English had become more or less recognizable as something related to what we speak today.

Still, the slew of foreign words remained. Because English (and later American) law relied heavily on Roman legal concepts, many Latin legal terms were and are still used (although you could probably throw a lot of bricks in the region of a courthouse and not endanger any lawyers capable of speaking Latin).

Italian terms spread, partly as a result of the popularity of Italian cuisine, both in England and in America. The same thing happened to French cooking terms, particularly after the publication of Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child in 1961. (Before then, most Americans wouldnt have known a saut pan from a stock pot if youd belted them over the head with it.)

Spanish words came into common usage after the American conquest of the Southwest in the nineteenth century and in the twentieth century after the growth of the Hispanic population in all parts of the country. In the twentieth century, particularly during the countercultural decade of the 1960s, Sanskrit terms such as dharma became popular among young people discovering the mystic traditions of the Eastor, at any rate, what they interpreted as the mystic traditions.

The charm of all these words and phrases is partly that they serve to remind us of our complex linguistic heritage, something too few people today take the time to think about. Amid the spread of the ghastly phenomenon known as Textish, it does us good to contemplate the long, tortuous journey of our Mother Tongue.

Theres an added benefit in knowing the sorts of words and phrases that are listed in this book: Using them can make you seem smart.

Thats a bit curious, when you think about it. Theres no evidence that the Romans of 2,000 years ago, for instance, were any more intelligent than we are. After all, their empire was brought down and divided up by people called Goths and Vandals. But despite that epic collapse, toss out a quotation or two in Latin at a cocktail party and youll find people hanging on your every word. (On the other hand, how many people today speak Goth or Vandal? Not too damn many, thats for sure!)

Seasoning your conversation with bon mots, whether in French or Italian, can make you sound sophisticated and cool. People will imagine you sauntering down the Champs lyses, stopping to sip a glass of wine at a sidewalk caf and sample a succulent cheese or pastry. Theyll see you lounging in a trattoria on a street off the Piazza San Marco in Venice, your espresso in front of you, as you exchange cheerful banter with the gondoliers.

Closer to home, theyll see you as the kind of person who gets invited to parties at the offices of the New Yorker or Vanity Fair, when you can rub elbows with the cognoscenti and exchange witticisms with writers and editors wearing tweed jackets with patches on the elbows, smelling of pipe tobacco and literature.

In fact, after reading this book, you might want to get such a jacket.

For each word in this book, weve included a pronunciation guide (since nothing says poseur like mispronouncing a foreign phrase) as well as background information on who said some of these things and why. That way you can doubly impress people when you remark, As Julius Caesar said in 43 B.C. when crossing the Rubicon, Alea iacta est. Weve also included sample sentences to show how these words and phrases might be injected into ordinary conversation.

The downside of using a word or term from a foreign language is that your listeners may think you actually speak it. If you observe to a casual companion, Je ne regrette rien, you may be taken aback if he suddenly bursts into a flood of French that leaves you standing dazed and confused. The solution to such a circumstance is to cough quickly into your drink, pretend to choke, and murmur, Scusez-moi as you hastily seek friendlier fields for conversation.

Above all, we hope this book implants in you an appreciation of the beauty of language and the multitude of purposes to which it can be put. And if it helps you impress your friends and acquaintances and get dateswell, thats cool too.

Wareham, Massachusetts, December 2011

Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

ab aeterno