Pardon your French

August 28th, 2008 at 07:00am Barry Wood

Beware of adopted French phrases: They probably aren’t spelled the way they sound.

Two have come up recently, each involving the French preposition “en,” which is pronounced more like “on” than “in,” but can mean either.

The first, and much more common, is “en route.” It means “on the way” or “along the way.” Substituting “in route” is not an exact translation or acceptable idiom. In fact, “en route” is now an English term, too.

The second is the fencing term “en garde” (note the spelling of “garde”). Now this one actually means “on guard” and is essentially pronounced the same (I don’t really want to get into how the French say their n’s).

However, this is swordplay, not wordplay, so use the French spelling.

Entry Filed under: French in English