Learning French
Adding ing does not make a phrase English
Many terms have been created using this misinformed technique
Un brushing is not quite what you might think it is
Yuri A/Shutterstock
The first time you see a list of prices in a French hairdressing salon, you might be surprised that un brushing costs €35 or more.
Why pay so much for someone to brush your hair?
Further investigation reveals that un brushing is, in fact, a cut and blow-dry, involving far more work than a simple brush-through, therefore justifying the price.
There are many such words that the French fully believe to be English, and they nearly always end in ing, as if this automatically transforms a word into an Anglo-Saxon alternative.
Un dressing is an everyday French term for a walk-in wardrobe or closet, which they believe is the same in English (for anyone who has forgotten, a ‘dressing room’ is usually found in theatres and is where actors get changed).
Similarly, un relooking makes sense linguistically, but it is not the term we use at all: we would say ‘a makeover’.
You might also have encountered un jogging, which is the French term for a tracksuit or sweatsuit, not to be confused with the activity of ‘jogging’, because in this country, that would be faire du footing.
If you want to say that you are putting on a tracksuit to go jogging, that’s quite clearly je mets mon jogging pour faire du footing.
I am rather fond of this habit of adding ing to create an anglicism, however hit-and-miss.
Our equivalent would be adding la to any English word to make it sound French: la house, la garden or la cup.
And let us not forget that when the British refer to a bedroom that has its own private bathroom, we talk about an 'en suite'.
However, in French ensuite simply means ‘then, afterwards’, making a nonsense of any hotel offering ‘12 bedrooms all ensuite’.
Linguistic borrowing is often flawed but there is a certain charm to its naive optimism.
