Origin of “Pardon My French”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Rachel from San Diego.

Hi, Rachel. Welcome to the program.

Thank you.

Hi, Rachel.

What can we do for you?

Well, I have a question for you guys. I am taking a French class at the moment, and once you notice something, you seem to see it everywhere. And so I began to notice the phrase, pardon my French, that we use when we cuss in English here in the States, and I was wondering, why do we use this phrase?

Mm—ha, very interesting. So you’re hearing people curse a blue streak and then they sort of back up, right? They put it in reverse and say, oh, pardon my French.

Yes, or even with anything, you know, you hear it on TV or in movies or even someone might say it when they’ve even done not necessarily cussing but said something negative or misgay. So I thought that was interesting. And I asked my French teacher because I’m taking a French 101 class. And she, you know, her first thing she said very nicely was, you know, it’s kind of offensive because I think American people cut a lot more than the French do.

Oh, you think?

Well, no.

No.

Wait a minute. Ask her what French actors say to each other right before they go on stage.

Oh, is there like a saying that is a…

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, we say break a leg. They say, well, I would have to tell you and then say pardon my French.

Yeah, they basically say get stuffed, right?

Well, no. You know, after she did say it offends her sometimes, she did say she thought possibly it could be derived from the idea that at one point American society was more puritanical or more straight-laced and French society was seen as more progressive. And so Americans might have used that phrase when, you know, saying something risque to kind of show that the French were more to that level or more risque or more.

Yes, I think we definitely have a reputation in Europe of being much more puritanical. True or not, but we do have the reputation. But I want to go back to her claim that the French curse less than the Americans. I think that’s a load of bollocks, actually. Pardon his French. Pardon my French. Pardon his British. Pardon my British.

I got to say, because maybe it was the crowd I was hanging with in France. It was artists and actors and musicians and the like. But when I lived in France, their language was rougher than mine. I felt like a kindergarten teacher, you know, the way I was speaking. The French can hold their own when it comes to cursing.

Anyway, your question, though, was about pardon my French. So somebody says something, a curse word or a swear word or something insulting, and they say, oh, well, pardon my French. And it’s a way of kind of getting out of the moment, right? Kind of escaping the responsibility for the thing they’ve said.

Yeah, just saying, oopsie.

Yeah, exactly. Excuse me. I’m thinking that it probably has to do with the conflicted relationship that the English have had with the French over the centuries. You know, for centuries, they’ve hated each other at one level or another. And yet we also, English speakers, are sort of wistful, I think, about the French language. You know, we borrow so many words from French, joie de vivre and that kind of thing. And people used to apologize for using French sometimes when they would use something normal like that. They would say, pardon my French. But people were often, especially during Victorian times, they were reaching for those fancy French words. Does that sound impressive, I think?

But at the same time, there are a lot of terms in English that are negative involving the French. Like, do you know what a French letter is?

No.

Do you, Grant?

I think so, but go ahead and tell me.

He’s pretending that he doesn’t know that a French letter is a condom.

Oh, yes, of course. Yeah, and if you take French leave, it means you leave a party without thanking the host. And the French have a reciprocal phrase like that that means to take English leave. But I don’t think that they say pardon my English when they curse.

But to pardon my French, if you go back to the earliest usage that you can find in the 1850s and 60s, you’ll often find that somebody has said something mildly offensive. And then they say pardon my French, and they say it in such a way with other kinds of phraseology that allows the hearer to go ahead and ignore the offensive thing that they said. It’s kind of a way of saying, excuse me. And so that all parties can agree that even though an offensive thing was said, let’s not dwell upon it and move on to the next thing.

So you’re pretending as if the thing you said is incomprehensible in another language. And even in some of the earliest uses, I find it actually is in French. There’s an example from a book called Two Lives or To Seem and To Be by Maria Jane McIntosh from 1853. And in it, one of the people says, the American ladies are charming, very charming. Mais on peut prude, pardon my French, I could not be so bold to say it in English. In other words, she said that the American ladies are prudes in French in order to kind of disguise the insult that she was giving. And so even though somebody might later say something actually in English, they still say pardon my French as a way of kind of disguising the fact that it was offensive, allowing you to believe that you misunderstood.

That’s what I did wonder, is if it actually at some point was used with French language, which would make much more sense than to just say something in English and then say pardon my French.

Right. At that point, I thought, why not pardon my Italian or Russian or I don’t know.

Exactly.

Right, right. And I’m not aware of anything, say, for example, in Spanish that’s, you know, pardon my Portuguese or something. I think it’s specifically English-French.

Okay.

Cool, cool. Wow. Well, thank you very much for answering my question.

Mais oui, mademoiselle.

Well, thank you.

Merci.

Yeah.

Au revoir.

Bye-bye.

We’ll enjoy.

Thanks, Rachel.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

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