Re: Now that is a fine example of administrative busybodies
> > Cue the horde of self-righteous anglo-ethnocentrists whose intuitions are divinely infallible... <sigh>
>
> You then go and patronisingly scoff at a point made that an actual French person in this comment section has verified to be the case.
Huh? By the time I read the article there was already a comment about "administrative busybodies" that had a slew of follows ups, in which the use of the English word in French was frequently and unashamedly argued to be normal, natural, modern, [etc]. (With an inference that any discussion otherwise is some kind of retrograde and futile exercise in pencil-pushing.) We all read through the prism of our own experience and perhaps this leapt out at me more than it leapt out at you. But it satisfies the anthropological definition of ethnocentrism as far as I can tell so I don't think my comment was out of line.
As for patronisingly scoffing, I don't even know at which or whose point you believe I scoffed. I went on to make my own point, not scoff at anyone else's. At least that's what I was thinking when I wrote, and had nobody else's point in mind, for scoffing at or anything else. Apologies to anyone who felt scoffed at, but as it clearly wasn't you, let me just say that you judged my intentions (incorrectly) rather addressing what I wrote or the point I was trying to make.
As for this alleged scoffing victim being an "actual French person" - so? I speak and write French natively enough, having lived and raised kids in the language for more than a couple of decades, and I was specifically speaking from the perspective of French as it is spoken in North America, _as opposed to what might seem to be normal in France_. Indeed that was _exactly_ my point. (Some intellectually lazy oaf is likely at this point to whip out the old "but that's not real French", to which I'd just draw their attention to how the English-speaking world is currently spread out and urge them to draw some parallels.)
Whatever the hoopla may be about the use or recognition of "fin de semaine" in France, it is utterly moot from the perspective of at least one significant French-speaking people (outside Europe) that has _never not used those words_. On the contrary, it is the increased use of "weekend" (like "shopping", and "parking", and ...) coming from Europe that comes off as bizarre _in this French-language context_, given that linguistically native terms are already in wide usage ("magasinage", "stationnement", ...). If y'all wonder why the French might want to find and use non-English words in their language, we are more often than not wondering why they want to adopt English words in the first place when there are _already_ words for such things that harmonize more naturally with the rest of the vocabulary and grammar, and that sound less freakish when applied.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
