I got yelled at to "stop being so bloody obstreperous" all the time as a child!

But, yeah. Add to that the tendency to use untranslated French phrases, which was pretty common in highbrow UK journalism even into the early 2000s. Pretty much everyone in Britain learnt French as their second language, but there are plenty of people who went to school in other countries who have no French at all so it was pretty exclusionary.