Tuesday 29 December 2015

etymology - English words mockingly derived from French?

According to Wikipedia, up to 30% of English words come from French, and I'm interested in a special subset of them. Not "loan words", but words that seem potentially derived in jest.



For example, "hoosegow" seems to be a tongue-in-cheek corruption of the Spanish "jusgado".



Three possible examples of cheerful manglings of "Frank-ase" are:



I've seen Western old-timers obviously relishing the use of those words around their Creole acquaintances. And, thousands of French words made it into English, with less alteration, both before and since these two examples.



So, two questions:



  1. What are some more of these words? Or better yet a good source of them? (My Google-fu has failed me.)

  2. Any evidence to support or disprove the conjecture that these word-hijackings are mocking highfalutin French usage?

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