Many new English words were born in 2009. Were the same born in French? If so, are the phenomena – environmental, political, social, technological – similar in both countries? They seem to be.
The strange thing is that, out of the top 40 of Petit Larousse’s new French words, more than half come from English.
Why couldn’t the French come up with their own words for ‘to unfriend,’ ‘to google,’ ‘geek,’ and ‘burn-out’ (whereas they do have the perfectly good word ‘saturation’ for that!)?
Susan Husserl-Kapit
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Back Bay Français 
Because english words are “cool”… Or so I’ve been told.
In Québec and Canada, people are trying to resist this trend : they refuse to leave out American movie titles in French, and translate them without fail, even if the result are sometimes terrible.
Funnily enough, our national conglomerate of fossilised pseudo-scholars (A.K.A. L’Académie Française) does little to stop it. But when you’re one century old, processing information according to reason isn’t all that easy.
Defecating in the right places is already a mighty enough challenge.
To be honnest, we have tried and failed miserably : we invented “courriel” (it sounds really gay) to counter the powerful “e-mail”. But English words sound technical and professional, so people tend to stick to them.
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