August 5, 2006
On Freedom Fries II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:00 PM EST Josh Zeitz notes the demise of Freedom Fries in the House cafeteria on Capitol Hill, but suggests, I suspect tongue in cheek, that French Fries be rebranded as chips. Unfortunately, Americans who call fries chips, like Americans who call apartments flats, tend to arouse hostile merriment. But having (however briefly) renamed French fries, there is one reason to maintain the achievement. French fries are not indisputably French. They are at least as likely to be Belgian in origin, and the French themselves associate fries with Belgium. They may also be Spanish (Galician), and I have seen a theory that they were in fact invented by Belgians in Spain, from where they made their way to Belgium. There is even a theory that they were named after an eighteenth-century Albany tavern keeper surnamed French. Belgian Fries, Spanish Fries or Albany fries sound unpromising, but fries are often simply called fries, and maybe that would be simplest, rather than continue to credit France with a possibly undeserved achievement. We have already given them French toast, which relatively few Frenchman claim as indisputably French in origin. Alternately, we could keep calling them French fries but struggle to revive “French leave,” for desertion from the military, “French letter,” for condom, French pox, etc. Linguistically attributing undesirable properties to others has a very long history, a lot of which was still in use when I was young—Dutch courage for drunken bravado, talking like a Dutch Uncle for abusive remonstrance, Indian-giving and welshing for going back on a deal—but it does seem interesting that the most feared and hated enemies have been less subject to this than have less-alarming enemies, French fries being a case in point. I can only think of one exception—Japping someone, for treacherous attack—and I have rarely heard it used or seen it in print. Germany, which seriously menaced Anglophones twice in the last century, has not generated much pejorative usage of this kind. One apparent exception actually proves the rule: a divorce granted a woman in 1885 because her husband, the politician Sir Charles Dilke, had sexual tastes a judge subsequently described as involving “Hunnish practices.” In my experience, no one who delightedly quotes the decision has any idea of precisely what that jurist had in mind, and it is not clear that anyone knew exactly what was meant at the time. In 1885, of course, Germans were nothing like as feared as they would be in subsequent generations, but that is when Hunnish practices took a hit.
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