They are everywhere.
Anglicisms are valiant invaders, which it is increasingly difficult to kick out of our country.
If they are sometimes useful, if they seem to translate an idea better than its French equivalent, most of the time they lead to serious misunderstandings.
Modeled on a French sentence, some English words are used in the wrong context.
The editorial staff has selected five and offers to drive them out of your conversation forever.
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● "Support a candidate"
If you tell your friend that you are
“putting up with him in this difficulty,”
you are not a great moral support.
This very fashionable Anglicism actually says the opposite of what the interlocutor means.
In English
"to support"
means
"to support"
.
But in French, the verb
“to support”
means
“to receive the weight, the push of something on oneself”
.
A meaning, a bit different from the one you want to convey to your friend ...
● "I wonder"
In French, the verb means
"to ask questions to someone"
,
"to question him"
.
We cannot use the verb
"to question"
to mean
"to question"
, nor
"to wonder about"
, in the sense of the English word
"to question"
.
So
let's
avoid saying:
“I'm wondering about the merits of this investigation”
, or
“I'm asking you to get to know you better”
.
But let us prefer to say "I question myself", "I question".
● Feeling "concerned" by global warming
Here again, the adjective
"concerned"
is borrowed, in this context, from English.
Problem: in French, it does not mean the same thing.
It is used here, wrongly, as a synonym of
"worried"
, meaning of the English word.
"Concern"
in English means:
"worry, concern"
.
But in our language, this term is used to signify that one is
"interested in something"
, or
"that one has a particular relationship with a thing, or a person"
, as the Trésor de the French language.
The more correct expressions in this context would be: “I am worried about global warming”.
● "Make sense"
“Yes, that makes sense”
.
To model the English formula
"make sense"
is not a good idea.
"Faire sens"
, in French, has almost ... no meaning.
It is also understood in the form:
"my point is a problem"
.
Let us recall that in the language of Molière, we use the verbs
"to have"
,
"to take"
meaning, or
"to pose"
,
"to create"
,
"to constitute" a
problem.
● He was very “confident” before his baccalaureate
The word
“confident”
in French cannot be used in the sense of
“confident”
... quite simply because this word means something else in our language.
A “confidant” is one who
“receives someone's confidences”
.
We are the confidant of a friend, of a close acquaintance, when we are intimate with this person.
But the French equivalent of the English
“confident”
is indeed
“confident”
, which means:
“who has confidence in someone or in something”
,
“who is disposed by nature to trust”
.