French

The French word for 'German' became the name of a stately dance that traveled from Renaissance courts to Bach's keyboard suites — a reminder that nations once defined each other through the way they moved.

The French borrowed a Latin word for a lover — amator, one who loves — to name someone who pursues an activity for love rather than money, and then the word became an insult.

The first ambulances were not vehicles but walking hospitals — mobile field units that followed armies on foot across battlefields.

Before the menu begins, a small gift arrives unbidden from the kitchen — the amuse-bouche is a one-bite act of hospitality that also announces, discreetly, what kind of cook you are about to meet.

Unexpectedly, android began as a word for human likeness.

Surprisingly, animalcule began as a name for tiny animals.

Before the meal, the French open the appetite — and the word for the drink that does this job comes from the Latin for 'opening,' making every pre-dinner Campari or vermouth a small act of aperture.

An atelier is a workshop, but not just any workshop — it is the place where an artist's mastery becomes a tradition, passed from hand to hand through the physical intelligence of making.

The diplomat attached to an embassy gave his title to the leather case he carried.

A word born in the Alps — probably from a Romanic root meaning 'to descend' — that named the most terrifying descent in the mountain world and became a metaphor for any overwhelming, unstoppable force.

Avant-garde is a military term — the troops sent ahead of the main army to clear the path — that became the name for every art movement that declared itself ahead of its time.

A French word for a small stick — a wand, a conductor's baton, the rod in a jeweler's setting — became, in the twentieth century, the defining symbol of French national identity and the bread that Parisians carry unwrapped under their arms.

The most prestigious card game in the high-stakes rooms of European and Macau casinos — and the favorite of James Bond — may take its name from the Venetian dialect word for 'zero,' the value of the face cards that define the game's central arithmetic.

A French city gave its name to the blade that transformed infantry warfare — though whether Bayonne made the weapons or merely supplied them first, the knife and the city are permanently joined.

A roadside shelf and a velvet seat are the same word.

The first barricades were made of barrels -- French barricade comes from barrique (barrel), and the Parisians who invented street revolution built their walls from wine casks.

A cloth so fine it was said to be woven from thread spun by angels — named, perhaps, for a thirteenth-century weaver from Cambrai whose identity is as delicate as the fabric itself.

A 19th-century French card game that became briefly fashionable in Victorian England partly through Winston Churchill's grandfather and the Prince of Wales — its name's etymology remains genuinely unknown, a rare admission of defeat in the history of card-game scholarship.

Unexpectedly, bertillonage was named after one Paris police clerk.

The word bistro may carry inside it a Russian soldier's impatient command — 'quickly!' — shouted in the cafes of Paris after Napoleon's defeat.

A French word of uncertain origin — bobine, a small spool for winding thread — became the name for the humble cylinder at the heart of every sewing machine, loom, and lace-maker's cushion.

A room named for sulking — from the French verb bouder, 'to pout' — the boudoir was where a woman went to be angry, and the world reimagined it as a room for seduction.

A French diminutive of a word for a small wood or thicket — a little cluster of trees — that became a word for a bunch of flowers, and then for the complex aroma that rises from a glass of aged wine.

The bourgeois began as a simple legal category — the person who lived in a walled town — before becoming the most politically charged word in the vocabulary of modernity.

From the French for 'to stuff' or 'bundle of sticks' — a vigorous peasant dance from the Auvergne that leaped from country barns to Baroque concert halls, carrying the energy of rural France into the architecture of Bach and Handel.

A Greek apothecary's storeroom became a French shop became an English adjective for anything small, exclusive, and expensive.

The French word for a bud — bouton, a small swelling that pushes outward — became the name for the humble disc that holds your shirt together.

French cooks named their slow-cooking method after live coals — the meat braised in a covered pot was surrounded by embers, cooked from every direction by the heat of burning wood reduced to ash.

A French verb meaning 'to stitch' produced a word for a stitched pamphlet — and now names the glossy, unstitched marketing materials that fill every hotel lobby on earth.

A French word meaning simply 'burned' — the feminine past participle of brûler, to burn — became the name for one of the world's most beloved desserts, a dish defined by the thin, crackling layer of intentionally scorched sugar on its surface.

A French word for a writing desk — named for the rough wool cloth that covered it — became the name for the entire apparatus of modern administrative government.

A French word for a goat's leap — from Italian capriola, itself from Latin caper — named a light, bouncing carriage whose springy ride felt like capering across cobblestones.

The place where your browser secretly stores websites to load them faster was originally a hunter's hiding spot for supplies in the North American wilderness.

To build a bridge pier in a river, engineers sank giant boxes to the riverbed, pumped out the water, and sent workers down to dig in compressed air — a technique whose name means nothing more remarkable than 'big box,' but whose history is written in the bodies of the men who worked inside them.

A sacred pipe reached English through a word that first meant a little reed.

The French word for blowing smoke in someone's face — camoufler, to disguise with a puff — became the military science of making armies invisible.

The most scandalous dance of 19th-century Paris took its name not from its kicking legs but from a slang word for noisy scandal — the same word French children used to imitate a quacking duck.

The short-barreled gun carried by cavalry may owe its name to medieval plague bearers -- carabin was a word for those who buried the dead, and the soldiers who carried the gun inherited their title.

A pale green glaze perfected by Chinese potters was named — improbably — after a lovelorn shepherd in a seventeenth-century French novel, whose pale green ribbons became synonymous with the color itself.

The reclining daybed with a seat long enough to extend the legs is called, in French, simply 'long chair' — a description so accurate it barely qualifies as a name, yet the French phrase defeated all English alternatives and became the standard term in furniture catalogs worldwide.

The French word for a pork butcher's shop has become, in the twenty-first century, a noun for an arrangement of cured meats on a board — a culinary vocabulary word absorbed so fast that its origin as a trade guild has almost completely disappeared.

A monastery liqueur lent its name to a color so electric it barely looks natural — the yellow-green of a world on the verge of fluorescence.

Château began as a castle — a fortified military stronghold — and became the word for both aristocratic grandeur and the wines made in its shadow.

A chauffeur was a stoker — the person who shoveled coal to heat a steam engine, before gasoline made the fire unnecessary and the title decorative.

The French word for 'chief' — a leader, a head, a boss — was borrowed by English solely for the kitchen, as if the only hierarchy that mattered was the one governing dinner.

French weavers named a yarn after a caterpillar — the fuzzy, soft, forward-creeping creature whose body the pile thread perfectly resembled.

The French onomatopoeia for the sound of a printing plate striking molten metal became the word for any idea repeated so often it loses its force.

A French word that may have begun as the sound of a latch clicking shut — the small, sharp noise of a door closing in your face, naming the group that closed it.

From the French word for 'partitioned,' cloisonne names the ancient art of filling tiny metal cells with colored glass paste — a technique perfected independently on three continents.

The word for an artwork assembled from pasted fragments means, in French, simply 'gluing' — and the radical act of cutting a newspaper and pasting it onto a canvas was the gesture that broke the boundary between art and the world outside the studio.

The formal diplomatic statement is simply French for 'something communicated' — the plainness of the name belies the gravity of the contents.

Preserved in its own fat and cooked slowly until tender — confit is one of the oldest preservation techniques in French cooking, invented by necessity and perfected into a luxury.

To make a perfect consommé, you must first destroy the broth — then rebuild it, clearer than water, from the ruins of egg whites and ground meat dragged slowly through the liquid like a living filter.

The ribbed fabric supposedly named for the king's cords was almost certainly never called that in France — but the English phrase caught and held, and the false etymology became the word.

A smooth, strained sauce of puréed fruit or vegetable — coulis is among the oldest French culinary terms, and its root in the verb 'to flow' says exactly what a good sauce should do.

Couture is simply sewing — but when Paris took hold of the word, it became the name for the summit of human making, the belief that a garment can be a work of art.

The French word for a small hook — crochet — became the name of an entire textile art, one built loop by loop with nothing but a single hooked needle and a length of yarn.

A crescent moon baked into bread — the French word for 'growing' became a pastry that may or may not commemorate a military victory over the Ottoman Empire.

The croupier — the casino official who rakes in losing bets — was originally the person who sat behind you on a horse, riding on the croup: the word traveled from the horse's hindquarters to the gambling table.

The French diminutive of croûte — 'little crust' — turned stale bread's hardest, most discarded part into the crunchy jewel that crowns a bowl of soup or salad.

A French past participle meaning simply 'grown' — from the verb croître, to grow — that became one of the most powerful words in wine, naming the specific plot of earth whose character defines a wine's identity and price.

Cuisine comes from Latin coquina — a kitchen. The word that now suggests artistry and refinement originally named nothing more than the room where food was cooked.

A French word for the contents of a vat — simply what fills the tank — that became the winemaker's term for a deliberate blend, a selection, the assemblage that turns raw ingredients into a finished vision.

The world's most popular fabric is named after a French city most people can't find on a map.

The French word for breaking things apart gave English its word for what's left after destruction.

The French word for a first stroke in a game of billiards — scattering balls from a starting position — became the English word for any first public appearance.

A French word built from a Latin term for the lip of a vessel — the edge over which liquid pours — that became the English verb for the careful, ceremonial act of separating wine from its sediment.

A French word meaning 'to un-ice' — to melt what has frozen and hardened onto the surface of a pan — became the technique that rescues the most flavorful part of cooking from being washed away.

French peasants looked at a common weed and saw a lion's teeth in its jagged leaves — the name outlasted every attempt to dignify the plant.

A word that means releasing tension — borrowed from the mechanism of a crossbow's trigger.

The dragoon — the mounted infantry soldier who gave his name to one of history's most feared cavalry types — was named after the short musket he carried, which was itself named after the fire-breathing dragon whose breath it seemed to imitate.

Vikings never sailed in drakkars. French historians invented the word they are famous for.

The most demanding equestrian discipline borrows its name from the French word for getting dressed — both involve long hours of careful preparation.

Every mechanical clock in history owes its regulated tick to a single invention: the escapement, named for the controlled escape of energy through a toothed wheel — without it, a clock's gears would simply spin freely and all meaning of timekeeping would unravel.

The phrase means simply 'in open air,' and it names the practice that changed Western painting: leaving the studio to observe and record light outdoors, in conditions that shift by the minute, with results the Academy had no framework to evaluate.

Encore — the cry that demands the performer return for more — is the French word for 'again' or 'still,' and what began as a British theatrical custom misapplied to a French word is now the universal signal that an audience refuses to let the performance end.

Before steam distillation, the only way to capture the scent of the most delicate flowers was to coax it into cold fat — one petal at a time.

The French word for someone who 'undertakes' — originally a military term for a commander launching an attack — became the global word for anyone who launches a business venture.

To send someone in your place is to trust them with your voice — and sometimes with your life.

The ornamental shoulder pad of military dress uniforms began as functional armor and ended as pure theater — the history of the epaulette is the history of how military necessity becomes military ceremony.

The French word for the organized gathering of secret intelligence is built on the Old Italian word for a spy — which is itself built on a Germanic root meaning simply 'to look' — making espionage, at its etymological core, nothing more elaborate than the act of watching.

The open shelving unit for displaying objects — books, figurines, curiosities — takes its name from the French word for a tier or shelf, which itself descends from a Germanic root meaning 'to place' or 'to store,' giving French furniture its most architecturally transparent name.

A small ticket or label posted in a royal garden to keep courtiers off the grass — the literal meaning of étiquette — somehow became the entire code of polite behavior.

A gleaming tin-glazed earthenware named for the Italian city of Faenza, though the technique it describes was perfected centuries earlier by Islamic potters who never heard the name.

From the Old French word for a pledge or promise — a fiancée is not merely a person you love but a person you have promised to love, the pledge made flesh.

The phrase meaning 'end of the century' became, in the 1890s, the name for a mood rather than a date — a pervasive atmosphere of exhaustion, decadence, and anxious anticipation that Europe felt as the nineteenth century drew to its close, and which every subsequent century-end rediscovers.

The French word for setting something ablaze moved into the kitchen as a moment of tableside theater — the deliberate burning of food that produces both flavor and spectacle.

The flâneur was the philosopher of the pavement — a figure who turned aimless walking through the city into a method of seeing everything the modern world had become.

A French word of debated origin — possibly from frire (to fry) and casser (to break) — naming a dish of cut-up meat first browned and then braised in a white sauce, a technique that bridges two worlds of cooking.

The spiraling cone that equalized the pulling force of a coiling mainspring in early pocket watches takes its name from the French word for a spindle of thread — because the gut line that linked cone to spring coiled around the fusee exactly as thread winds onto a spool.

The word fusillade — a rapid and continuous burst of fire — descends from the French word for a type of steel used to strike sparks from flint, making it a word whose etymology is built on the moment of ignition, the first spark that set everything burning.

The French court dance that Bach elevated into a baroque art form takes its name not from a step or a musical structure but from a people — the Gavots, mountain dwellers of the French Alps who brought their folk dances down to the lowlands.

The French word for cake carries a castle inside it — not metaphorically, but etymologically, the same Germanic root that built both the walled fortification and the elaborate, layered confection of the French pastry table.

A French word for ice — from Latin glacies — became the standard term for the slow rivers of frozen water that carved much of the world's mountain landscape and, in retreating, named a geological epoch.

The French word for a wine merchant's assistant — a servant who tasted before serving — became the English word for a connoisseur of fine food.

A French word built from gris — grey — names the technique of painting entirely in shades of grey, creating images that mimic sculpture, deny color, and prove that light and shadow alone can make a flat surface breathe.

The French called it the high wood — hautbois, the loud, piercing woodwind that cut through Renaissance outdoor music — and English borrowed the word so poorly that the spelling and the sound went their separate ways.

A chef's knife technique became a proper name, and a proper name became a technique — and no one can agree which came first: the cut that gave Julienne her name, or the person named Julienne who gave the cut its method.

The dish that is named after the pot it is cooked in carries an etymology that leads, surprisingly, back to ancient Greece — a word for a ladle or cup traveled through Latin, Old Provençal, and French over two millennia before naming the all-in-one cooking vessel of the American suburban kitchen.

French for 'place-holder' became every army's word for the officer who stands where the captain cannot.

A Persian citrus fruit crossed the Arab world, seeded through medieval Mediterranean trade, and eventually landed in French cafes where sugar and water turned it into the drink that named an entire category of refreshment.

The French word for 'things made of linen' — from linge, meaning washable cloth — became the English word for the most intimate garments a person can wear.

For five centuries, a macaron was a simple almond meringue — then two Parisian confectioners sandwiched two of them together with ganache, and the world forgot the original ever existed.

A small scallop-shaped cake dipped in tea unlocked three thousand pages of memory — and the word for it is itself a memory: a woman's name pressed into butter and flour, baked into the most famous literary bite in history.

A French word for a vagrant became the English word for anyone who takes what isn't theirs.

Every marionette is a little Mary — French puppets were named for the Virgin, because the first string-pulled figures danced in medieval Nativity plays.

A martinet was a real person before it was an insult -- Jean Martinet drilled Louis XIV's armies with such relentless precision that his name became a byword for rigid discipline.

The most ubiquitous condiment in the world carries an etymology that is genuinely unresolved — two competing stories, both plausible, one involving a naval battle in 1756 and one involving a much older French word for egg yolk, and the truth may be impossible to recover.

The dance that ruled European courts for a century takes its name from an adjective meaning 'tiny' — the minuet was named for the smallness of its steps at a time when how you moved your feet announced your place in the social order.

Meringue is the alchemist's dream of the kitchen — turning nothing but air, sugar, and egg white into something that shatters at the touch.

French for 'everything in its place,' mise en place is the professional kitchen's organizing philosophy — and one of the clearest descriptions of what separates a craftsperson from an amateur in any disciplined practice.

The word for the film technique of assembling shots into meaning derives from a French verb meaning to mount or climb — and the Soviet theorists who turned it into a manifesto believed that two images placed next to each other could produce a third meaning that neither contained alone.

Oddly, morpheme is a modern word built from ancient form.

A fabric whose surface shimmers like water in motion takes its name from the English word for mohair — which takes its name from Arabic — which takes its name from a goat. The word for the most liquid-looking of all textiles is, at its root, an animal.

The French word for someone born yesterday — from Latin nativus, 'native, natural' — became English's gentlest insult for the dangerously innocent.

A water pipe is named after a coconut. That is not a metaphor.

To be negligently dressed — that was the original meaning, the word for a state of deliberate undress that was considered not shameful but intimate, the costume of the private chamber before it became the costume of lingerie catalogues.

The parterre — a formal garden of geometric beds seen at its most extravagant at Versailles — simply means 'on the ground' in French, a deliberately modest name for a form of garden design that sometimes covered acres and required the labor of dozens.

Considered for centuries the finest two-player card game in Europe — praised by Rabelais, played by Charles I on his way to execution, and given a chapter in virtually every serious card-game manual from 1650 to 1900 — piquet's name may derive simply from the French word for a pointed stake.

A platoon was a 'small ball' of soldiers — from the French pelote, the same root that gave English 'pellet,' troops rolled into a tight formation.

Surprisingly, phoneme names a mental sound, not a spoken noise.

A pirouette is a complete spin on one leg — the word comes from the French for a spinning top, and it names the moment in classical ballet when the dancer's body becomes pure rotation, a human axis defying the impulse to fall.

French for a flat plate — the same word that holds your dinner — was scaled up to name a landform that holds entire civilizations at altitude.

A French word built from point — a dot, a small mark — names the painting technique of building images entirely from tiny dots of pure color that merge in the viewer's eye, replacing the painter's brush with the beholder's retina.

French settlers crossing the American interior saw meadows larger than any meadow should be and reached for their word for a field — and the French word for a small meadow became the name for an ocean of grass.

A French marshal's cook accidentally dropped almonds into boiling sugar, and a nobleman's name became the word for the caramelized nut confection that would inspire a Belgian chocolate empire.

A little profit — that is what the word means, and for three centuries the profiterole was exactly that: a small bread roll given as a gratuity, a bonus, a token of generosity, before it became one of the great pleasures of the pastry cart.

The French past participle of 'to protect' — a protégé is, literally, a protected person, someone shielded by another's power and invested with another's ambition.

The French word for flea became a color — specifically the color of a flea that has just been crushed, a muted brownish-red that is either deeply unpleasant or quietly elegant depending on the light.

To restore the appetite, to revive the taste — the French verb that produced ragoût is also the root of the word restaurant, making every slow-simmered stew an act of gustatory revival.

From the French verb meaning 'to bring back,' rapport names the invisible thread that connects two people — something carried across the space between them.

Diplomacy's most hopeful word is simply French for 'a coming closer' — the movement toward, not the arrival.

A Provençal peasant dish of stewed summer vegetables that became, through a Pixar film and a Thomas Keller recipe, one of the most symbolically loaded preparations in contemporary cooking — the word itself sounds like a drumroll.

The constant-force device that insulates a clock's escapement from variations in its driving power takes its name from the French for 'to wind up again' — because it works by winding a small secondary spring or weight at regular intervals, then releasing its perfectly consistent force to the escapement.

The military term for scouting enemy positions is built on the French verb 'to recognize' — the same root as cognition and knowledge — revealing that military intelligence, at its etymological heart, is simply the act of knowing a landscape before you must fight across it.

A Latin word meaning 'to lead back' — to bring something to its essential form — became the kitchen's name for concentrating a liquid by boiling away everything that is not flavor.

A sauce whose name most likely derives from a word for horseradish — rémoulade is one of the great condiment words of French cuisine, and its journey from Artois to New Orleans is a story of culinary migration.

Before it was a place to eat, a restaurant was a thing to eat — a rich, restorative broth sold to the exhausted and unwell. The medicine became the establishment, and the cure became the cuisine.

The bullet that bounces was named for a skipping stone -- French ricochet first described the playful hop of a flat rock across water before it described lethal deflection.

The word means simply 'little wheel' in French — and the spinning wheel at the heart of the casino's most theatrical game may have been invented partly by Blaise Pascal in his attempts to build a perpetual motion machine.

Roux is the cornerstone of French classical cooking — a simple marriage of fat and flour that underpins hundreds of sauces and embodies a philosophy of culinary transformation.

French workers threw their wooden shoes into the machinery—or so the legend goes. The truth is subtler, but the word stuck.

The person in wooden shoes who wrecks the machinery — French gave the destroyer a name that sounds almost elegant.

A cotton cloth that borrowed satin's weave structure and then modified its name with a suffix that declared the imitation upfront — the textile world's most honest act of flattery.

The French word for jumping gave its name to the cooking technique where food leaps and tumbles in a hot pan — and the word still carries the kinetic energy of its origin.

From the French verb 'to look at oneself in a mirror,' mirage named the desert phenomenon where light performs its own reflection — water that is not water, seen in sand that has become its own mirror.

Unexpectedly, semantics is a very modern scholarly coinage.

A Greek compound meaning 'sign-bearer' named a system of moving arms that could transmit a message across a hundred miles without wires, electricity, or physical movement of anything except wood.

A fabric named for its power to enchant — the French called it 'the charmer' because its surface, woven to expose the silk's luster on one face and matte on the other, was considered literally seductive. Few textiles have ever been named for the effect they have on observers.

New England's great seafood soup is named not for any ingredient but for the cauldron it was cooked in — a French word for a large iron pot that Breton fishermen brought across the Atlantic and left in the mouths of everyone who ever ate on a cold coast.

A word meaning 'alone' that names a dozen different card games, a type of peg-removal puzzle, a single gemstone in a ring setting, and the default app installed on hundreds of millions of Windows computers — the loneliness of solitaire became one of the defining pastimes of the office era.

The person who selects your wine at a fine restaurant carries a title that traces back to a medieval pack-animal driver — the sommelier began as the man in charge of the mules.

A soufflé is simply something that has been breathed — puffed up by the heat of the oven and the imprisoned breath of beaten eggs.

The French phrase for 'Swedish gloves' — gants de Suède — was so closely associated with a particular buttery leather that the country's name became the name of the fabric itself.

The word for something uncannily dreamlike was coined in 1917 as the name of an artistic movement — and its inventor, Guillaume Apollinaire, made it from two parts: the French word for 'real' and a prefix meaning 'above,' naming the movement's ambition to find a higher reality beyond the visible world.

The word for a striking visual scene or composition began as a diminutive of 'table' — a small board or panel — and traveled from panel painting to theater to poetry to rhetoric, picking up meanings at each stop without shedding the earlier ones.

A French word derived from a Celtic term for the oak tree — the very tree whose bark was used to cure leather — that became the name for the astringent compounds that give red wine its structure, grip, and capacity to age.

The mole — small, subterranean, obsessive about darkness — gave its fur to one of the most sophisticated and contested colors in the modern palette.

The French word for the specific character that a place gives to what grows there — terroir is perhaps the most untranslatable word in the food and wine vocabulary, and its untranslatability is part of its meaning.

The French word simply means 'cloth' — yet in English it names a very specific decorative pattern of pastoral scenes, a whole aesthetic reduced to a single French word that, in French, means nothing special at all.

The finest of all bridal veils, the fabric that makes ballerinas float and brides dissolve into light, takes its name from a small silk-weaving city in south-central France — a place few people have visited but whose name every wedding dress carries.

The tall white hat that announces a chef across a dining room carries one of the most contested etymologies in the language — possibly Arabic, possibly Celtic, definitely French, and transformed from a sixteenth-century courtier's cap into the defining symbol of professional cooking.

The rotating cage that carries a watch's escapement in a slow revolution was invented by Abraham-Louis Breguet in 1801 to defeat gravity — and he named it 'whirlwind,' because the steady rotation that corrects positional errors looks, under magnification, like a tiny storm of precision.

Triage — the practice of sorting the wounded by survivability — was born not in a hospital but on the battlefield, where a French surgeon realized that time was the scarcest resource and that saving some meant abandoning others.

The phrase means 'deceives the eye,' and for three centuries it has named painting's most immodest ambition: to make a flat surface so convincingly three-dimensional that the viewer reaches out to touch something that is not there.

The nozzle that feeds the forge its breath — an invisible component without which no fire reaches working temperature.

Named for velvet — the luxurious medieval fabric — velouté is one of the five mother sauces of French cuisine, its name a tactile description of what a well-made sauce should feel like on the tongue.

The word for the exclusive private preview of an art exhibition means, literally, 'varnishing' — because the day before the Royal Academy's annual exhibition opened to the public, artists were allowed in to apply the final coat of varnish to their submitted paintings.

A little vine curling around the margins of a medieval manuscript grew into the word for every brief, evocative scene in literature and film.

A small bottle of vinegar became a sauce, a smelling salt, and a carriage — all sharing one name, because the French see in the sharp tang of wine-vinegar the thread that binds a flavored dressing to a Victorian lady's silver-capped vial.

Oddly, vogue began with rowing and motion.

The French word for sail names a fabric so sheer and lightweight that it seems to be made of nothing — cloth as near-air, translucent as the light it lets through.

The frenzied finale of the baroque suite was originally named for a fiddle — the French word for the instrument and the dance it animated share the same root, and the English 'jig' brought both across the Channel.