http://joebolte.com

Today in a lecture, a French-speaking colleague of mine couldn’t get a bit of code to work, and after letting a nice cuss word fly, excused himself by saying “Pardon my French.” This was a hilarious fulfillment of a life-long dream for me, so of course I forgave him. It also reminded me about my theory of why people say this after swearing. Before the advent of Google, I decided (in a complete vacuum of information) that the phrase must have originated when you wanted to disguise the fact that you just said something naughty around a child, so you would say “Pardon my French” to make them think you were using a phrase from another language to disengage their interest and prevent them from trying the phrase out themselves. It turns out that just like my theory that you can get yourself into shape quickly by smoking a ton of marijuana and then not eating anything when you get the munchies, this has absolutely nothing to do with reality. As Google clearly shows, the origin of the phrase is closely tied with historical perception of the French as filthy, obscene and sex-obsessed. Some interesting tidbits: The phrase first appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 1895; in Russian literature, characters often switched to French to swear to prevent sullying their own language, so that speaking French was associated with swear words; and that the f-word actually means “shield” in French so that when you said it you actually were speaking French. I was not able to confirm this with Google translate, but maybe it has been programmed not to translate naughty words for some reason.