I learnt only recently that a “French exit” is what is said to happen when a person leaves a social gathering of some kind without saying goodbye. It is suggested that this often occurs when people want to avoid farewells which they fear might be socially awkward or distressing in some way. Simply slipping away unnoticed can avoid potential complications and difficulties.
Amusingly enough, although in English we refer to this kind of deliberately inconspicuous departure as “French”, in the French language itself it is known as filer à l’anglaise, “to slip away in the English manner”. (In the United States, it is apparently sometimes known as an “Irish goodbye”.)
“French leave”, a phrase which I was already familiar with, is not quite the same thing but means leaving without permission – going absent from work or some other form of duty, perhaps military, without authorisation.
Ascribing unusual or unorthodox behaviours to foreigners in this way is a very common process, but it is typically not just any old foreigner who is selected for this doubtful honour. Most often, in this country we find that it is the French and Dutch, our nearest and therefore most familiar neighbours, who turn up in these locutions.
But these nations are not only our nearest neighbours (leaving aside Belgium which is a new arrival on the nation-state scene, having been founded as recently as 1830). They were also antagonists in relatively recent wars against Britain, and therefore have a history of featuring relatively prominently in our national consciousness.
The most recent conflict between Great Britain and the Netherlands was the Fourth Anglo-Dutch war of 1780–84. But Britain was most recently at war with France, in the form of Vichy France, which was allied with Nazi Germany between 1940 and 42. When the Royal Navy sank the French fleet at the Battle of Mers El-Kébir, Algeria, in July 1940, almost 1,300 French naval personnel died in what was the 20th century’s most one-sided sea battle – British Royal Navy casualties were zero.
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Examples of such usages involving the Netherlands include “Dutch courage”, which is usually interpreted as “bravery aided by the consumption of alcohol”. “Double Dutch” means speech which is not readily intelligible, perhaps because it is too rapid or garbled. And “to go Dutch” means that a couple going out together will share the expenses, rather than the man paying for the woman in the formerly more traditional way. A “Dutch uncle” is a mostly American term for someone who gives stern but well-meant advice to someone, as opposed to the more typically caring and friendly approach of a real uncle.
Sometimes there may be more substance to these sayings than just proximity to the home country and wars. The Greek expression na einai englezos sto randevou sou, which translates literally as “to be English at your rendezvous”, means to arrive on time. Certainly the Greeks have a stereotypical view of the British that we tend to be on time or even early for appointments. It is definitely true in my experience (and I have been fortunate enough to visit Greece more than 100 times) that Greeks are, shall we say, rather less likely to arrive on time than we are.
Foreign
The English spelling of the word foreign is very odd. Until the 1600s it was spelt foran or foreyne. The change to the current version with the extraneous -g- probably came about as a result of the influence of words such as reign and sovereign, where that way of spelling the words is actually etymological.
