Émigrés by Richard Scholar, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters

The fascinating continuing history of French words that have entered the English language-and that reveal the fertile but fraught relationship between English- and French-speaking cultures across the worldEnglish has borrowed more words from French than from any other modern foreign language. French words and phrases-such asà la mode, ennui, naïveté, andcaprice-lend English a certainje-ne-sais-quoithat would otherwise elude the language. Richard Scholar examines the continuing history of untranslated French words in English and asks what these words reveal of the fertile but fraught relationship that England and France have long shared and that now entangles English- and French-speaking cultures all over the world.Émigrésdemonstrates that French borrowings have, over the centuries, "turned" English in more ways than one. From the seventeenth-century polymath John Evelyn's complaint that English lacks "words that do so fully express" the Frenchennuiandnaïveté, to George W. Bush's purported claim that "the French don't have a word for entrepreneur," this unique history of English argues that French words have offered more than the mere seasoning of the occasionalmot juste. They have established themselves as "creolizing keywords" that both connect English speakers to-and separate them from-French. Moving from the realms of opera to ice cream, the book shows how migrant French words are never the same again for having ventured abroad, and how they complete English by reminding us that it is fundamentally incomplete. At a moment of resurgent nationalism in the English-speaking world,Émigrésinvites native Anglophone readers to consider how much we owe French and why so many of us remain ambivalent about the migrants in our midst. | Émigrés by Richard Scholar, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters