The French Words Everyone Gets Wrong

Some words look harmless and then trip you the moment you use them. You hear them everywhere, on the telly, at the office, in the mouths of people who sound perfectly sure of themselves, and yet they miss the mark. No harm done: a language lives and shifts. But if you love general knowledge, knowing where an expression comes from is also knowing how to wield it with a sly little smile. Here are a few classics.

When the spelling hides a story

Let's start with the tastiest: "au temps pour moi". Plenty of people write "autant pour moi", which seems logical enough (a mistake for me, an equal share for you). The Académie française, however, insists on the military spelling. In drills and in fencing, "au temps!" is the command to restart a botched movement from the top. So admitting you got it wrong means asking to begin again: "au temps pour moi". In the name of honesty, linguists are still bickering over this one, and "autant" has its serious defenders. But if you want to be right at a dinner party, the "au temps" version hands you a nice anecdote as a bonus.

Another trap, quieter this time: "achalandé". People use it for a shop well stocked with goods. Except that a "chaland", in old French, is a customer. An "achalandé" business, originally, is one that pulls in a crowd, not one with full shelves. The distinction has all but vanished from everyday use, but it explains why the word sounds odd when you describe a fridge as "bien achalandé". Your fridge has no customers.

The everyday false friends

On to "décimer". The verb comes from a rather chilling Roman punishment: in a legion guilty of cowardice, one soldier in ten was drawn by lot and executed by his own comrades. The root is "decem", ten. So talking about a population "entirely decimated" is an amusing contradiction, since to decimate meant to kill a fraction, not to wipe out the lot. That said, modern usage has stretched the meaning to "cause heavy losses", and nobody will really pull you up on it. But you'll know the word counts, at heart, only up to ten.

In the department of mistreated verbs, "pallier" deserves a mention. You almost always hear it followed by "à": "pallier à un manque". Grammatically, that's one word too many. Pallier takes a direct object, no preposition needed: on pallie un problème, on pallie une absence. The image is telling, since the word shares its root with "palliatif": you don't cure the ill, you throw a cloak ("pallium", in Latin) over it to soften it. A plaster, not a remedy.

Then there's a lovely pair often muddled up: "rebattre" and "rabattre" les oreilles. When someone "rebat" your ears with a story, they repeat it until it wears thin, the way you shuffle and deal the same pack of cards over and over. "Rabattre les oreilles" doesn't exist in that sense, even if the ear itself would rather be left in peace.

The tics that give you away

Some slips don't concern one particular word but a small mechanism inside the sentence. Take the pleonasm. "Au jour d'aujourd'hui" stacks the same idea three times over, since "aujourd'hui" already contains "hui", which meant "this day" in old French. You might as well say "on the day of this day of this day". Same story with "voire même": "voire" already means "and even", so you're doubling the dose for nothing. A plain "voire" is quite enough to sound polished.

And then there's "soi-disant", my favourite of the polite traps. Strictly, it applies to someone who calls themselves something: a "soi-disant" expert is a person who claims to be an expert. An object, on the other hand, can say nothing about itself. Talking about a "soi-disant remède" is therefore, by the book, a slight liberty. Here again, usage has come down on the side of flexibility, but knowing the inner logic of the word is what separates the one who recites from the one who understands.

You'll have noticed that none of these blunders makes a sentence impossible to follow. The language is sturdy enough to absorb our approximations, and correcting them in other people is the shortest road to being annoying. The real pleasure isn't in pulling up your neighbour, it's in sensing, behind each word, the little story that shaped it: a fencing command, a Roman punishment, a forgotten customer. That's exactly the sort of detail that makes the difference on a trick question, when the clock is running and you have to choose between two answers that look alike. General knowledge, in the end, comes down to that: knowing why, not just what.