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| valet |
The longer I live in France, the more I see how we borrow from each other's languages and how we do it wrong. For example, in French, “valet” is not a person who parks your car at an expensive restaurant. A “valet” is either a manservant to a king in the olden days, a Jack (as in cards), or a handy piece of furniture that holds up your suit (one of these came with my studio, actually).
The French don’t ever use this word for someone that parks your car. We just made it up.
On the other hand, when the French borrow an English word, they love to add “-ing” to the end of it. The present continuous (i.e. I am eat-ing, you are talk-ing) is a tense that doesn’t really exist in French, and they seem generally confused about how to use it. So they use it all the time. You wash your hair with a bottle of “le shampooing” and you leave your car in “le parking.” Not a parking ramp, not a parking lot, just “le parking.”
I got spam in my e-mail this morning advertising for a “family shooting.” This sounds like domestic violence, but it’s accompanied by an image like this:
Is this like a “before” picture?
Nope. What they were trying to say was “family photo shoot.”
Or maybe what they meant was this:
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