When Hana asked me the other day where her talkie-walkies were, I thought to myself, gee, we gotta step up her English maintenance. Boy, was I in for it - flipping through a catalog later I learned that here in France, walkie-talkies are actually called talkie-walkies. Yes! Why, you ask? Why, I've asked. Nobody seems to know. It's like the French REALLY did not want to take the English word for it but could not get around to inventing a French word for it, so they just reversed the order - to show the anglophones just who gets the last word when it comes to languages!
Sometimes the French not only just reverse the word order, they also use English words but in quite different meanings. The other day I read an article in a magazine about "relooking". Hmmmm - doing double takes? Meticulously checking oneself out in the mirror? No, "relooking" apparently means makeovers, as in before-afters. Why "relooking"? Why indeed? Why not "new looking" while you are at it?
Another French-cized word that always makes me laugh is "footing". When you hear a French person say "je vais faire du footing" (which, admittedly, is not often), he is not trying to tell you that he is trying to maybe get a foot in the door somewhere, or to maintain his balance or to try to find himself even. No, it means that he is going for a jog. Now why turn a perfectly good word like jogging into footing? Yes, the French pronounce the "j" differently but why bother creating a new word that would confuse everyone that is not French?
Response from PeeWee: Because we are French and because we can. So there.
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