Saturday 5 April 2014

francophone

The French tend to be perceived as lingual purists and practise a healthy disdain for outside influences that threaten to dilute their language and heritage into some sort of pidgin, especially when there are already perfectly good native words, without the need for borrowing from other sources.
The guardians of the lingua franca, however, are entertaining submissions for candidates to be incorporated into the lexicon. The Local's French edition features some of these entries, which are unquestionably authentic in character and could already pass for common-parlance: some of the best include equivader—a French approximation of the concept of procrastination (for which there is no exactly equivalent), combining the words for chatting and avoidance to describe those easy distractions, se mรฉmรฉriser (from the term mรฉmรฉ for grandmother) means to dress like a granny, and oubliophobie to describe that sinking feeling of loss or dread that we have forgotten something when that experience comes too often as to seem like a malady.