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Comment by mturmon | Hacker News Reader

The OP speaks about French resentment of Anglo-Saxon cultural encroachment as if it's some kind of childish French fixation ("That there is a deeply-rooted animosity in the French psyche towards Anglo-Saxon cultural domination cannot be disputed; indeed, it has been documented and analysed for decades.")

But then, remember Freedom Fries and cheese-eating Surrender Monkeys, and it seems like we all have our childish side.

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But it really is a silly childish thing. They made up "courriel" just so they didn't have to use "email". But electronic is électroniques in French (and both ultimately come from the Greek) and the English word "mail" is derived from Old French. It's an opportunity to underline the French in English and shared heritage I would have thought.

As the other comment points out, the things you point to weren't mandated by the State; I think the whole idea of the State controlling the language in such a way is insane.

The usage of couriel instead of email is not enforced by the state, but is suggested by the French Academy (which is not a governemental organization). The State can enforce the usage in the documents it produces itself, but this is different. Courriel is not made-up, it was actually coming from French Canadian.

While this may be a bit ridiculous (being that I have never heard anyone in France saying courriel), this is not a big conspiracy against Anglo-Saxons.

I would also note that in the US, every mention of fuck or other obscene word is beeped when put on air. How is it that different (everyone knowing what is said, like everyone knows that facebook or twitter is what is being talked about instead of social media). Of course, presented as one of this silly little thing found in any culture, this would not make an interesting blog post anymore.

I would also note that in the US, every mention of fuck or other obscene word is beeped when put on air. How is it that different...?

It's very different. Bleeping expletives is a result of (idiotic) anti-obscenity laws. Banning talk of Facebook or Twitter is (officially, anyway) about not advertising commercial entities on news outlets, and some misguided notion of "fairness" between various social networking services.

But the article is about the over-regulation in France - in that aspect, you have the same idea of banning some language. The reason why is different, but the idea of controlling language itself is not specific to France.

We're agreeing, actually. This is exactly the point I was trying to make. Yes, it's the same idea in the sense that specific words/language is banned. But the reasoning behind it is very different, and that's what matters. I don't agree with banning words like "fuck" from American airwaves, but I'm somewhat ok with it because it's done because collectively the people don't like them. France's ban on "Facebook" and "Twitter" is for weakly-supported economic "fairness" reasons.

What I said is that both initiatives are somewhat petty, and somewhat comparable (government officials deprecating "foreign" terms). The article fails to recognize that both cultures have their peculiarities, and treats this trait as being peculiar to the French.

I agree that when the President, vice-President, and SecDef of the U.S. hold up another country to ridicule, as President Bush and his leadership team did with regard to France ("old Europe" and all the rest), it is indeed different in many ways than a set of French broadcasting bureaucrats forbidding certain words.

I'm just not sure the difference works strongly in favor of your argument that the French case is more outrageous.

This ban has absolutely nothing to do with any kind of resentment of Anglo-Saxon culture (though such a resentment does definitely exist).

In France citing the name of a commercial entity when it's not relevant to the news/show is considered unfair advertisement. So it's banned, unless you name all competitors of the field. It's very common when watching a live TV show to have the interviewer remind the interviewee that they cannot name a brand.

France have many such "fairness" rules. Another example is during presidential elections: all TV/radio channels must allot the exact same air time to all candidates.

Thanks for the info. This thread got sidetracked.

But the FCC never banned the phrase French Fries.

The FCC is quite keen on banning words, though.

The difference is quite small.

The French traditionally are very proud of French culture and (in the USA) have a stereotype of being very snobby about it.

Keep in mind that France actually invented its own term for email simply to have a term that it considered to be more French.

Many languages have their own terms for various modern things. In Finnish email is sähköposti, though often casually we just call it meili

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