Jon Pretty

It's funny how "delicatessen" in German is "Feinkost" and "double entendre" in French is "double sens". (Though sure, both world be understood in French/German.) Does anyone else know any other "loan words" which were not just loaned, but stolen?

we use "parking" for car park, "Bistro" for pub (russian for quickly). For English: I heard "à la mode" for desserts, "au naturel" in French means "unaltered", "chef" is not only for kitchen (head in French, why hat is a couvre-chef). "Entrée" is not supposed to be the main dish

"exposé" is I think a hot topic in English, it's just a report/talk about anything in French. There's "in lieu of" that is strange. And the winner is UTC, which neither means "universal common time" nor "Temps Universel commun"

oh. And politicians, media and managers who don't understand anything at all use "crypté" in place of the correct "chiffré", "digital" (which means "related to fingers" in French) in place of "numérique". And obviously, pingouin is a manchot, not a pingouin.

"maître d'" seems to be a word, which clearly breaks parsers. We use "mail" for and only for "email". "Brainstorming" is for a meeting where people try to be creative. "Happy hour" only means"drink are cheap now". String, slip, smoking, pull, sweat are all clothes.

"ciao" is only for goodbye in French. American seems to drink coffee, but it's clearly not the same think as our café. And we call ristretto what an Italian believes to be a normal coffee. We use "marketing" as a verb. And it's more communication than marketing here.

This is quite a list! I take no responsibility for "entrée" or "maître d'", which are Americanisms, though.