riot against the academie..... coin a word for fluffy and just relentlessly use it? how does wordage work with an official word body
Riot against the Académie! I want to protect it like a tiny, precious, pompous baby. Don’t get me wrong, they’re terrible. They have no actual power over the French language, they just give opinions, so they are blameless when it comes to our meagre cat vocabulary, but they did say feminising our language was a mortal peril back in 2017 and I bet they’d feel the same way about felinising it.
But I would miss them if anyone guillotined them; it’s hard to explain. The French Academy was created by Richelieu and its members are called The Immortals and instead of using the word 'hacker’ in French they want us to say fouineur. That’s just one example, but, a fouine is a weasel. An institution created by the villain from The Three Musketeers has an opinion about hackers and this opinion is ‘they should be called internet weasels’. They say the French equivalent of ‘comfort food’ is ‘un roboratif’ and they quote Victor Hugo and Caius Crispus Sallustus to corroborate their claims about correct usage. They genuinely asked ‘Why not say fallacious information instead of fake news?’ and their latest attempt to coin French words for social media neologisms ended with: ‘Acolyte des illustres, this would seem to be the best equivalent of follower.’ They’ve published eight books since 1634 and have been writing a new dictionary for the past 40 years. Their website has a page called ‘How to become immortal’. What would we do without them?
