Something might be “faux fur,” “faux leather,” or “faux meat,” meaning that it is an imitation of the real thing. “Faux” comes up in other instances, of course. In French, faux pas translates to a false step. It’s not “fo pah” or “faux pa.” The correct form of this expression is “faux pas” But what is a faux pas?Ī faux pas is a slip in etiquette or a social blunder (in a conversation or in an action) that causes offense embarrassment. Phonetic spelling never works in such instances.
Remember, the phrase you’re looking for seeped into English from French. If you’re writing about a “faux pa,” I’m tempted to ask, who’s you’re daddy? Though, maybe I should back up… In Modern French, this process has gone so far that pas has gradually taken over the main job of negating verbs, and the original negator non, now ne, is often simply omitted.Uh oh. People started saying not only je ne vais pas, ‘I’m not going’, but also je ne bois pas, ‘I’m not drinking’, and je ne mange pas, ‘I’m not eating’. Similarly, pas lost all connection with walking, and eventually became the most popular of all these negators, replacing most of the others. Then, slowly, words such as point and mie, which had originally been employed to reinforce a negative statement, started acquiring negative meanings themselves, and their original more concrete meanings were gradually lost so mie, ‘crumb’, ended up being extended as a marker of negation to verbs which had nothing to do with eating.
(One other development that occurred, as can be seen here, was that it became necessary in French to insert pronouns like je, ‘I’, because Latin personal endings like -o ‘first-person singular’, as in vad-o, had been lost.) Reinforcing the negativity of non/ne in this way eventually became the norm in French. At the same time, non was gradually reduced to ne so non vado passum gradually came to be expressed as je ne vais pas, and non bibo gutta became je ne bois goutte. We do the same kind of thing in English sometimes: I’m not budging an inch I’m not eating a thing I’m not saying a word.Īs Latin gradually morphed into French, passum was reduced to pas, punctum became point, micam turned into mie, and gutta changed to goutte. Similarly, non vedo, ‘I don’t see’ was increasingly expressed as non vedo punctum,’I don’t see (a single) point’ non comedo, ‘I’m not eating’ became non comedo micam, ‘I’m not eating (a) crumb’ and non bibo, ‘I’m not drinking’ was expanded to non bibo gutta, ‘I’m not drinking (a) drop’. This may initially have been for emphasis, and/or because the word non was increasingly being reduced in pronunciation, so that adding passum after the verb made it clearer what was being said. As time went by, however, it seems that people were increasingly inclined to say, instead or as well, non vado passum, meaning ‘I’m not going (a) step’. Vado was a verb form meaning ‘I go, I am going’, so non vado signified ‘I’m not going’. In Latin, the word for ‘not’ was non, and it was placed before the verb. How could a word meaning ‘step’ end up meaning ‘not’? – because that is what really did happen. On the face of it, this is something of a surprise. What is intriguing about the two senses of pas as ‘not’ and ‘step’ in French, however, is that they were originally one and the same word. Pas, paso and pace all descend from the Latin word passum, ‘step’. The Spanish equivalent of French pas is paso, as in paso doble, literally ‘double step’. In ballet, a pas de deux is a dance for two people and pas de chat, ‘a cat’s step’, is a jumping step where each foot is alternately raised up to the knee of the opposite leg. You may also know that pas in French has another totally different meaning: ‘step’, corresponding to the English word pace.
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