French kiss.
French fries.
French toast.
French doors.
French windows.
French manicure.
French braid.
French press.
English is unusually obsessed with French as a brand. In most other languages, this habit is far weaker (none of the languages I know use “French” for anything, except French kiss)
Why is so much French in English?
World War I is a significant contributor to why the term “French” became a label for numerous everyday things.
Not because the French invented them, but because France became a symbolic place in soldiers’ memories.
Between 1917 and 1919, millions of American, British, Canadian, and Australian soldiers were stationed in France.
For many of them, this was the first time:
leaving their country
hearing another language daily
seeing cafés, wine with meals, bread culture
encountering different norms around flirting, leisure, and social life
And crucially:
👉 France was where they were young, scared, alive, and intensely awake.
Psychologically, that matters.
Trauma + Novelty = Strong Cultural Imprint
WWI was brutal.
But between the trenches, soldiers experienced something else:
warm meals in villages
women who kissed differently
food cooked with butter and fat
coffee rituals
doors and windows unlike at home
a slower rhythm of social life
When soldiers returned home, they didn’t say: I learned a new kissing style in a French-speaking region influenced by 19th-century European social norms.
They said: I had a French kiss.
They didn’t say: We ate fried potatoes prepared by civilians in a multilingual region of Europe.
They said: French fries are amazing.
French became shorthand for:
foreign
exciting
adult
sensual
not home
not proper
not Protestant
not restrained
In English-speaking countries especially, France stood in contrast to Anglo restraint, moral seriousness and industrial efficiency. So the label stuck.
By the 1920s and 30s, advertisers picked up on the associations. French sold luxury, sex, and refinement.
By the time Hollywood arrived, the work was already done. Cinema polished what war memory had created: Paris as romance, France as sensuality, French as shorthand for permission.
Today, the world believes in Frenchiness not because it exists, but because it was filmed, repeated, sold, and subtitled.
Frenchiness, as a concept, did its work on me too. But instead of stopping at the surface, I wanted to dive deep and understand it from the inside.
That’s why I’m learning French.
Not to sound sophisticated, but to step into a different emotional climate.
English is efficient, precise and excellent at clarity.
French lets things linger.
And sometimes, what I want from language is not accuracy, but permission.
Permission to joie de vivre not as a slogan, but as a practice.
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