French words of the day: bureau, bureaucrat, and easy languages

English language has many french words. Bureau can mean a desk, or an office. A bureaucrat is a stickler for following rules and procedures.

Easy to read languages
In Europe you find that Spanish is the easiest language to read off signs as you drive through the country.

French words are the ones I find most often in English newspapers, especially the erudite newspapers such as the Sunday Times.

In the Far East, Asia, foreign scripts are a challenge. The easiest language to read is Bahasa Malay in Malaysia.

Angela Lansbury, writer, photographer, teacher.

French words: bureau, bureaucracy, ensemble, petite, portmanteau, prologue

Here are some French words you will meet on your travels, mainly in the British newspapers and magazines.

Imagine your petite travel writer, tired of bureaucracy, sits at her bureau, beside her portmanteau, and tries to write the prologue to her roman de clé, using her nom de plume.

bureau - desk (or office)
bureaucracy - paperwork and offices doing time wasting paperwork
nom de plume - pen name
petite - Small (feminine) - the masculine is petit
pique - excite, arouse - middle French from the Latin - see dictionary.com which gives the origin of words
portmanteau - bag for carrying goods
prologue - first word, beginning of a book or explanation in advance of main chapter one, foreword
roman de clé - mystery novel

I shall now go and write the epilogue. (Afterword, a bit like those last words scrolling up the screen of a film based on a true story telling you what happened the villain and the heroine.)

French words - in our bureau by the portmanteau, we made our rapprochement

The Sunday Times, the British version, is still a great source of word from French, Greek, Latin and worldwide sources. One can sit debating the correct translation, before checking up on various websites translating. We decided Google translate was best.



We started translating the ingredients of humous.
Ingredients are usually easy. Everybody knows petits lois are peas.

Baffling - h u i l e  d e  C o l z a
We recognize the word guile as oil. No not guile, dear spell checker, h u i l e ! oil of what?

eventually we find a translation, rape seed oilAt first we were baffled by 50 % m o i n s  d e gras  (I had to separate the letter to stop spellchecker grabbing this word and changing it). Did it mean less than 50 per cent fat, or at least fifty per cent fat?
After several attempts to translate, we found the English elsewhere on the packet. It meant something which sounds just as odd in English as in French. Fifty per cent less.

per cent - two words, one word - another battle with the spell checker and another English word which sound like it might be of French origin

Here are a few French words I found today. I have not counted Cirque du Soleil - circle or circus of sun, the name or brand name of a circus without animals, great acrobats and music, avante grade - another set of French words. De is of. Du is of the masculine, whilst the French feminine form would be de la. Le soleil. Du soleil. The sun, masculine, of the sun.

bureau - a wooden chest of drawers, a desk, but also an office, especially one which welcomes enquiries and puts people in touch with services, as in bureau de tourism - I keep adding an e at the end of this word but spell checker keeps removing the last letter.

portmanteau - briefcase? old fashioned dresser? real and metaphor.

rapprochement - reconciliation.

Finally, mon Dieu - my god.
But c'est la vie. That's life.