Le saviez-vous ?
'tie" sur une invitation veut dire 'smoking' (en français, mais en anglais, smoking c'est {dinner-jacket) et 'White Tie' c'est l'habit.
faire du footing c'est 'to go walking'
Le speaker, une speakerine c'est 'The announcer, a female announcer'
C'est une petite brune c'est 'She is a petite brunette'
Un shake-hand c'est 'A hand-shake'
Filer à l'anglaise c'est 'To take French leave'
Roman licencieux, gravure licencieuse c'est 'French novel, Fernch print'
Excusez la grossièreté de mon langage c'est 'Please pardon the French'
E la capote anglaise, la 'french letter' !
https://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/french-letters/
Je vous recopie la page, car j'ai constaté que plus de la moitié de mes liens sur ce blog ne menaient plus à rien. On est à l'époque où on ne chante plus l'Internationale, car plus besoin de dire "Du passé faisons table rase".
Yes, okay, the reason that condoms might be called French is explicable. There have been historic reasons for traducing the French connected with war and invasion, and for associating dangerous sexual activity with being in WW1 France. Questions and comments on various websites rehash this information. But what is rarely considered is the other part of the term. Why letters? Some dodgy speculation says that historically condoms were made of thin leather, and the words leather and letter are almost the same!!

Early examples of condoms were often made from bits of animal bladders or gut – see Boswell’s journal from the late 18th century and that of Samuel Pepys from the late 17th century. But the suggestion that letter and leather sound the same and therefore have the same linguistic root is just plain silly. The etymological discussions unfortunately do not refer to when the ‘letter’ part of the term came about, and this is the most interesting aspect. The First World War examples that remain suggest that the packets that the condoms came in served as a kind of letter. The example shown here is from World War 2. Its use of the word envelope rather than packet is interesting, and other examples have a veritable encyclopaedia of information on them.


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