Day 3321 (Sunday) 12th July 2026
This is Menton
and this is Antibes.
It was another lovely sunny day and Dee sent me a message inviting us for lunch in a restaurant we’re not very keen on – it’s expensive and the portions are not big enough for Huw, so we declined but we arranged to meet them for a few beers before lunch.
The bay was absolutely packed with private yachts.
Town wasn’t very busy and Les Palmiers was very comfortable and we enjoyed a few beers with five expats.
13 French words that creep into your English
Certain French linguists use up a lot of angst on the many anglicisms that creep into modern French - but anglophones living in France may find more and more French words and phrases creeping into their conversational English.
The English and French languages share a lot of words and have deeply entwined roots. In fact one French linguist has made the case that La langue anglaise n'existe pas - c'est du français mal prononcé (the English language does not exist - it's just badly pronounced French. He was joking. Mostly).
Borrowing words between the two languages goes back to 1066 and beyond and continues to this day as all sorts of anglicisms crop up in everyday French from le wifi to un job, via un 'appy 'our to un co-working.
But while young French people like to toss in the odd English word to sound cool, English speakers who move to France and immerse themselves in the language often find French words creeping into their English.
Sometimes this is because a perfect English equivalent doesn't exist, other times it is because the French is snappier or just sounds better.
Here are some common examples.
Apéro - pre-dinner drinks. This one probably crops up because apéro plays a strong cultural part in French life, and there isn't an exact equivalent in anglophone cultures.
The French apéritif, commonly shortened to apéro, is drinks before dinner but it's also a social occasion and it's common to be either invited to someone's home for apéro, or to join people in a bar for apéro. On the other hand, the French themselves sometimes use a borrowed English phrase - happy hour - to talk about post-work drinks or an early-evening offer of reduced-price drinks in a bar.
Expo - exhibition or art show. The French 'o' ending is a common casual shortening of words, so you might find yourself using 'resto' (restaurant) or 'expo' (exhibition) if you're chatting about your weekend plans.
Profit well - enjoy/take advantage of - if you're wishing someone a good time or a happy experience, you might find yourself using the word 'profit'.
While profit in English is most commonly used in connection with finances, in French it's widely used for any experience that you might gain some benefit from eg profiter du soleil (to enjoy the sunshine) or profiter des vacances (to make the most of the holidays) or simply as a response if someone tells you they're off to do something fun 'profitez-bien !' (enjoy!)
Fonctionnaire - civil servant/public sector employee. While a perfectly adequate translation of this job status exists, somehow it doesn't convey the awesome power of the French fonctionnaire. In a heavily centralised state bureaucracy, the decision of a fonctionnaire can make the difference between an easy life and a nagging administrative nightmare. Wise people are therefore very polite to fonctionnaires.
If you're talking about them, not to them, you might be discussing the other side of this job status - while not especially well paid, public sector employees in France generally enjoy generous work conditions, benefit from perks like RTT days and are quite likely to strike. It's sometimes seen as a bit of a cushy job, but avoid saying this if you need one of them to help you.
Précision - clarification. Another one from the world of French administration, which will likely take up a significant amount of your time. A précision is simply a clarification or a statement offering further details on a previous announcement or decision. But the devil is in the details, and a simple précision can give a case a whole new meaning.
Dossier - file/application. The simple translation of a dossier is a file or folder, but it's also used more widely to mean the bundle of documents you have to put together to make an application to rent an apartment, for example, or for French residency or citizenship. It's sometimes also used as a shorthand to mean the application itself.
If your dossier is approved, everything is going well. On the other hand, a message telling you "Votre dossier est incomplet" is enough to make French residents break out in a cold sweat - the wimpy English translation (your file is incomplete) just doesn't convey the true horror of the situation.
Perturbed - disrupted. This one always sounds funny to English ears, where 'perturbed' is a very archaic way of talking about emotional distress or disquiet (think Jane Austen heroines). In France, on the other hand, trains, ferries and Metros are regularly 'perturbed', with perturbation describing any kind of disruption.
It's less specific than retardé (delayed) or annulé (cancelled) - perturbé tells that a service is disrupted, probably in a significant way.
Two thousands nineteen - 2019. This is a symptom of speaking French regularly, when year dates are spelled out in their entirety. Instead of the English way of saying 'twenty-nineteen' or 'nineteen eighty four', a French speaker would day deux milles dix neuf (two thousands nineteen) or mille neuf cent quatre-vingt quatre (one thousand, nine hundred eighty-four).
You might find yourself doing it with the time as well, specifying to friends that you want to meet at '20h' - meaning 8pm - and having them wonder why you're suddenly using military time to discuss a restaurant reservation.
Manif - demo. This is another one where a perfectly fine English translation exists, but it somehow doesn't convey the cultural importance of the French event. Manifestation means demonstration and the shortened version is manif, like demo.
But while protests of course exist in the UK, US, Australia and other English-speaking countries, they're not quite a part of the social fabric in the same way as in France. Tell your French friends that you're 'going to the manif' on May 1st and they will understand precisely what you mean with no need for further questions or clarifications.
Telly travail/ telly medicine - remote work, online medical consultation. Many of the anglicisms that are widely adopted in France become popular because they're shorter and snappier than the French version. Think le wifi versus access à internet sans fils. Or to give a franglais example salle de shoot versus salle de consommation à moindre risque.
But sometimes it happens the other way around and the prefix télé meaning something done at a distance online is a perfect example. It can then be added to any word to mean an online, distance version - eg télétravail - remote working, télémedecine - a remote doctor's appointment, téléconsultation - an online appointment.
More of these will likely emerge as the world moves online, and French has a perfect, elegant formula to add 'télé' to the beginning of the thing that is now online.
The Covid pandemic gave us another nice example of elegant prefixes, when le confinement (lockdown) became déconfinement (lifting lockdown) and then reconfinement (going back into lockdown).
RIB - bank details necessary to set up a direct debit or make a payment. Need someone to send you their banking details, including account name and number? French has an easy word for that RIB (pronounced reeb). It's an acronym for Relevé d'Identité Bancaire and is so handy you'll find yourself telling people to 'send me your RIB' with abandon.
Chômage - unemployment/unemployment benefits. Chômage simply means unemployment, so it's used to talk about unemployment levels within a country, but it's also widely used as a shorthand for unemployment payments/benefits. So you can casually say 'he's on chômage' to mean that someone isn't working but is registered with the French unemployment office to seek work, and for the moment is living off unemployment benefits.
Although it can be used negatively, it somehow feels less stigmatising than saying someone is 'on the dole' on 'on benefits'. France's generous unemployment system in which people are paid a percentage of their former salary for up to 18 months, means that chômage is sometimes more of a career goal than a catastrophe.
Controlled - stopped by police/inspectors for a check. Another piece of elegant French simplicity, if you were stopped by police for an ID check, if you were pulled over while driving for a vehicle check or if the conductor came round to inspect your ticket, you were 'controlled'.
In French that kind of official stop and check is un contrôle and the past tense verb form is contrôlé.
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