What Is The Origin Of (151)?…
Excuse my French
Swearing can be cathartic. If you have done something stupid, are about to blow your top or have hurt yourself, a few well-chosen oaths can make you feel better. Of course, those who pepper liberally each sentence with oaths in adjectival form can be tiresome and are often best avoided, in my experience.
There are some of us who are mildly embarrassed when an oath passes our lips and to cover this unfortunate lapse in common decency they add as a rider, excuse (or pardon) my French. As oaths are more often Anglo-Saxon in origin than French, it seems an odd turn of phrase, the origins of which are worth examining.
The earliest examples of the phrase date from around the 1830s. In Baron Karl von Miltie’s The Twelve Nights, published in 1831, we find, “bless me, how fat you have grown – absolutely as round as a ball; you will soon be embonpoint (excuse my French) as your poor dear father, the major.” By modern standards the speaker is being very rude but the reason for his apology is that his vocabulary has let him down and he has had to turn to the French version of a lard bucket.
That the origin of the phrase is really down to embarrassment for using a French term is confirmed by an extract from the Memoirs and Letters of Captain Sir William Hoste, dating to 1833. In the worthy Captain’s memoirs we find a description of the boarding of an enemy ship which includes the line, “Teddy and Lord Radstock’s son, Waldegrave, boarded the French commodore, and carried him l’épée à la main; excuse my French.”
It was not until the 1860s that our phrase was used in association with strong language as opposed to a foreign language. In Henry Sedley’s Marian Rooke; or the Quest for Fortune, published in 1865, we find, “dreadful good brandy o’yourn. Ha! Ha! Ha! My respects. Excuse my French.” To the modern ear, dreadful isn’t the type of oath for which even the most sensitive soul would feel embarrassed about using. In this passage it is used as an intensifier but nonetheless it must have had some imprecatory connotations that pass us by. By the time it appeared in Michael Harrison’s 1936 book, All The Trees were Green, it was associated with a word which we would more readily recognise as an oath; “A bloody sight better (pardon the French!) than most.”
So why French? England and France have spent more time glaring at each other across la Manche and having the occasional dust-ups than most other pairs of countries. The phrase, as we have seen, started out as an apology for actually lurching into French but there has also been a long history of using the word French adjectivally to describe something unsavoury. So we have a French letter as a euphemism for a condom and French pox to describe syphilis while a French novel or French print was a polite way of referring to pornography. To take French leave was to disappear without a by or leave, without permission.
Insults, though, are a two-way street and the French have retaliated in like form. Their equivalent of French leave is filer à l’anglaise while a condom is a capote anglaise and syphilis is la maladie anglaise. The French even have a couple portmanteau phrases to describe all that the English personify that is wrong in the world; le malaise anglais and le vice anglais.
Our phrase is an interesting example of how something which is literal in its use has turned into a more generic statement, leaving its original meaning lost in the mists of time.
Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: All the trees were green by Michael Harrison, Baron Karl von Miltie, French and English used as deprecatory adjectives, grammatical intensifiers, Henry Sedley, Marian Rooke, origin of excuse my French, origin of pardon my French
