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"Despite that", "France, it is" ... Six French mistakes that we no longer want (never) to hear

2022-03-24T06:16:25.292Z


Barbarisms frequently invade our sentences. The editorial staff offers you an anthology, not to be reused!


Examples of barbarism are legion: abusive extensions of meaning, barbarisms, syntactical blunders, neologisms... It is enough to hear one of these faults tirelessly repeated for our blood to boil.

"Currently in progress"

,

"close the light"

... Anthology of these linguistic demons who mistreat the French language.

” READ ALSO – Do you speak academic French?

● “The ball, it went over there”

“The inhabitants, they have their word to say”

,

“France, it is really beautiful”, “the car, it overtook me on the wrong side”

... The repetition of the subject is as frequent as it is irritating.

Is this a way of insisting, of emphasizing the tenor of his remarks?

The article does not need to be doubled by another, it is sufficient in itself.

The mania for removing the preposition

"that"

in sentences is a more or less similar phenomenon.

Selected pieces:

“he told me he will come”

,

“I think she left”

,

“do you think you are coming?”

... Why remove this harmless but indispensable word in this way?

● "I can't wait for the holidays!"

This is particularly popular with young people.

You may have noticed that the verb

"to be in a hurry"

is frequently amputated from the preposition

"to"

.

“I can't wait for spring”

is a sentence that should absolutely be avoided from one's language habits.

It is customary to say:

“to be in a hurry for something”

but never

“to be in a hurry for something”

.

So let's forever proscribe this turn of phrase in favor of

"looking forward to being on vacation / to being in spring"

or

"to the arrival of spring"

.

● “Look under the table”

This lack of French can cause the most patient of men to lose their temper.

Here again, the preposition

"of"

was discarded without further ado.

It is

"look under

the

table"

or even

"next

to

the chair"

that should be said and not

"next to the table"

or

"under the chair"

.

Wanting too much to save time, you end up forgetting your French.

” READ ALSO – Language tics, Anglicisms, barbarisms… These expressions that you hate

● “I want the best for baby”

This is a novelty as strange as it is irritating.

When some sprinkle their sentences with a double article, others decide the opposite... to delete it.

Advertisements for young children are the best example.

We no longer offer

“diapers for your baby”

, or

“for the baby”

, but

“for baby”

.

On social media, captions such as

“Walking with baby”

or

“Baby and mom having a quiet time”

abound post-length, much to our dismay.

This is a very strange fashion.

She seems to want to assimilate the parents and their child, in the same approximate language, the one spoken by the little ones who are just learning the language.

No doubt it is precisely for this reason that advertising has taken hold of this twitching tic...

● “Close/open light”

If the verbs

"to close"

and

"to open"

are accepted by the Larousse as a synonym

for "to open/extinguish"

, they belong to the colloquial register and are not in very good language.

Both turns of phrase are absent from the dictionary of the French Academy.

These towers are not to be condemned,

“but we would benefit from replacing them with more precise equivalents, especially in a more sustained register”

, notes the Linguistic Troubleshooting Bank.

The latter specifies that the formula

"turn on the light"

had also been condemned in the past, because it is not the light that is turned on, but the lamp.

The custom gradually imposed itself, and we have kept it as such.

"Turn on, turn off, turn on, run, activate, cut, stop..."

Just dig into these many synonyms to avoid the two unsightly verbs.

● "We made ourselves a museum yesterday", "which country did you go to?"

Rare are the verbs that are so successful.

"Making a museum"

,

"making a country"

...

"Making"

is served in all possible ways:

"making a couple, making a family, making a nation, making a church,..."

.

Borrowed from the Latin

facere

, it means

"to achieve something, to create, to commit"

.

The idea of

​​"creating a museum"

or

"creating a country"

leaves one wondering... Let us simply prefer to say:

"to visit a museum, a country"

, or to use the verb

"to go"

, absolutely avoiding the phrase:

" I made myself”

.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2022-03-24

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