They drive us crazy.
These words, which seem appropriate to whoever uses them, can have a detrimental effect on our mental health.
Yet we are all concerned by these little blunders of everyday life: abusive extensions of meaning, neologisms, anglicisms, faulty jobs ... No one is immune.
Our conversations bear witness to this.
Le Figaro
offers you an assortment of words and formulas that we believe are appropriate ... and which are not.
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● Solved
"I would like to solve this problem"
, we often hear around the corner of an office corridor.
This verb
"long, heavy, rather unsightly"
, as the French Academy describes it, owes its fortune to the irregularities of the conjugation of the verb
"to solve"
, for which it has become a substitute.
As well as
"the temptation of an easy derivation: in the 19th century there was only a verbal ending to be added to the verb '
solution'
to create
'solutionner'
."
But let us recall the existence of the French verb
"to solve"
, which can be preceded by an auxiliary for more ease:
"he will solve the problem"
, or
"he can, he will be able to solve this difficulty"
, and not
"He will solve the problem"
, or
"he will solve the difficulty"
.
Likewise, we
"find the solution to a question"
, not
"we solve the question"
.
● Confusing, confusing
“His speech is confusing”
,
“This grammar rule is confusing”
. Here are two pretty anglicisms to ban as a matter of urgency from our conversations. Their frequent use is precisely due to confusion.
Confused
English
is borrowed from the French adjective
“confused”.
But unlike our neighbors, who shot the adjective
confused
the verb
to confused,
we have no verb
"confuser"
. It is translated as
"to confuse"
, or
"to disturb, to confuse"
, or even
"to disturb"
. So let's trade
“confusing”
and
“confusing”
for
"Disturbing"
,
"disturbing"
, or
"disconcerting"
.
● Act
"I am against unemployment, it is registered"
,
"The university has registered my candidacy"
. Very popular in conversations, this verb originally belongs to the legal vocabulary. In their
Dictionary of words which (still) do not exist (
and which we use anyway
)
, Olivier Talon and Gilles Vervisch underline that it already existed in the Middle Ages to say:
"properly date acts, recognize them, check the dates. "
The French Academy recalls that its use must be limited to this field, and not be used
"by emphasis"
, to pass a personal opinion for a scientific truth.
Instead of saying
“your response has been recorded”
, let's prefer
“received”
.
Likewise, we do not
“act” on
an application, but we
“register” it
.
And we
"act a decision"
, and not
"a decision"
, because the verb is never constructed with the preposition
"of"
.
● Unreachable
The word is neither entirely wrong nor entirely appropriate.
We owe it to a clever mixture of English and French, imagined by Stendhal who wrote in his
Journal
on March 18, 1813:
“The great places inatteignables for me”
.
Proust uses it in his turn, but in a different form: one crosses the word
“inatteingible”
in his
Correspondence
, and the formula
“inattingibles lointains”
in
La Recherche.
The wise recommend to prefer the adjective
"inaccessible",
or the adjectival phrase
"out of reach".
● Face-to-face-distance
The word
“face-to-face”
is an ugly copy of
presential
English
. At the same time, the formula
"in distancing"
was formed
, to describe these long months of closure of public places. But let us remember that the French language has equivalents:
"in the presence"
and
"at a distance"
. The phrase
“distance learning”
also entered current usage more than eighty years ago, with the creation of the National Center for Distance Learning (CNED) in 1939.