OP, due to the nature of the content being talked about, could you tag the post NSFW?
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
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Done
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To be clear, this is a falsified version of this article from 2022 ("French officials told to abandon gaming Anglicisms")
I just checked if this exists (before I saw your post). It's excellent satire as it could so easily be true.
this is a falsified version of this
...dumbarse me fell for it. Damn. (In my own defence it's the sort of shit the French academy would propose.)
Ye gods! Don't get me started on the stupid anglicisms in gaming. It's fucking infuriating! But what can you do...
That makes sense. This seems more likely to come from Québecois language purists than French ones. 😉
EDIT - as another user highlighted this is a satire. A well done one. (I fell for it.)
The French academy has some really weird takes. And I'm not even talking about the kinks. (Props for them to actually talk about those things, though.)
linguistic borrowings were "a barrier to understanding"
Anecdote first. Years ago, I was helping some old lady with computers. And she was always confusing files with folders; for example, dragging the folder into the file instead of the opposite. Then it clicked me why - the local (Portuguese) names for both things:
- file - arquivo; also meaning "archive" (furniture or building where documents are stored)
- folder - pasta; also meaning "folder" (where you put paper sheets), "briefcase"
You put an offline folder inside an offline archive, but if you're dealing with computers you do the opposite.
I'm sharing this because it shows that semantic widening - the resource the academy is prescribing - can be also a source of barriers. But the main barrier isn't even the words you use to refer to a concept, it's the concept itself.
Plus when the borrowing is old enough it stops being seen as one. It becomes part of the vocab, changes meaning, etc. ("Cervoise" vs. "bière" are a good example - both borrowings [Celtic and Germanic], and originally simply "beer", but one eventually became associated with hop-less beers. I bet that, if those borrowings happened now, the academy would prescribe "vîn de grains" [grain wine].)
And the alternatives they offer aren't even good. To call orgasms "little deaths" is kind of poetic; it's OK in some situations but the opposite vibe of ahegao. Even plain "orgasme" would sound a bit better. (And perhaps "bouille" instead of "visage", to make it a bit coarser? Or even, you know... let the community itself decide it? If they feel strongly against borrowings they'll be probably able to come up with a good alternative.)
My experience is that using software translated into my native language, Croatian, is weird and confusing in general. As if it uses overly everyday vocabulary, without the adequately "techy" associations - when I paste (Cro. zalijepiti) something in real life, I do it with glue and it makes an object stand in place; when I paste (Cro. pejstati) something on my computer, I do it with ctrl+v and it results in a moved or duplicated file. Translated software uses the former Croatian word for the latter meaning as well, but to me the associations are much too different.
Alternatively, the terminology is coined consciously and spread top-down, so it's alien both to the original English and to everyday Croatian. Some of these terms have ended up accepted (sučelje = interface; probably from the verb sučeliti, to face something), but even after years of exposure in school I can't digest datoteka (Latin data + theca) for file. So, I stick to English whenever possible.
Croatian prescriptivists also love making up replacements for those pesky loanwords, but much like the French Academy's proposals (even those that aren't a parody: "jeu video de competition" instead of "e-sports") are cumbersome, overly literal multi-word constructions. They're not words at all, and I think they're particularly likely to not be accepted by the speakers. (This could be related to Shkovsky's idea of defamiliarisation, if you happen to be familiar with that by any chance...)
Same, I actively avoid using Croatian translations wherever possible because they're typically bad and sometimes lead to confusion when they translate some feature or option you're looking for in an unexpected way and then can't find it.
Yup, the same as the old lady - all those associations you make between a word and its meaning working against you, in a way a borrowing wouldn't. And if I had to guess:
- "pejstati" is an adapted borrowing of EN "paste"
- "zalijepiti" being perfective makes it even weirder in this situation.
Main difference is that "arquivo" and "pasta" are already well established within the community*; she isn't tech-savvy.
Croatian prescriptivists also love making up replacements for those pesky loanwords, but much like the French Academy’s proposals
The Italian Crusca also behaves like this. I feel like those people are trying to treat a language like a bird, and "protecting" it by placing it in a cage.
(Note to self: check if the ABL or Pasquale [a local prescriptivist] prescribe something for ahegao, shimaidon, oyakodon, hentai, etc. They probably don't.)
*there's also "ficheiro" for "file", but it's mostly in European varieties. And "dire[c]tório" for "folder", but it's pretty much exclusive to Linux users.
"visage de la petite mort" is amazing.
It is great, but I think the Acedémie Française is actually creating "a barrier to understanding" here. It's my understanding that ahegeo is a very specific expression, not just a generic o-face. Unless they can come up with a french word for that goofy face they're going to have to borrow.
Edit: It seems I have eaten the onion.
The French calling orgasms “the little death” has always stricken me as most excellent.
However “The face of the little death” for ahego (don’t google; I just learned the hard way) doesn’t make sense.
It should be “visage haletant” or something less of a mouthful.
doesn’t make sense. It should be...
Well, fortunately the picture is a joke.
However, i's based on this article: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-61647192 - and truth be told the original isn't much less ridiculous than the parody.
The streamer one in particular is like the French version of that 4chan green text about American vs British names. "MFW they call it a 'gun' instead of a Rooty Tooty Point And Shoot"
I don't speak French so I'm not confident on the syllable count...but it takes like 5x longer to say, right?
Ah, you reminded me of that classic
exactly that lol
What about le bukaké, Monsieurs?
We need to know! For science!
Shocked shibari wasn't mentioned here
shibari
Verboten! You should call it "bondage décoratif-érotique." ("Verboten" is also verboten.)
Knowing how stupid the academicians are, I felt for the trap. Recently, one of them wrote in a far right journal that the upper case was disappearing from French based on a random study from the guardian for English speaking people. It was founded during the monarchy, and collaborated during the German occupation. They should have been destroyed a long time ago (something like 1789)
I guess everyone got pissed off, huh
L’académie is basically a bunch of French teachers that want to stop the natural language shifting in French that occurs in every single language. It’s really not anything more than that. No one in France cares about what they say lol. French actually uses a ton of loanwords where they just simply pronounce them as if they were French words. For a topical example, in English, literally everyone uses the word hentai, pronounced different from in Japanese, for anime porn; anime is also the same type of loan word.
Ça fait écho a la loi Toubon, où chaque radio française devait diffuser au moins 30% de chansons en français (de souvenir, corrigez moi si je me trompe...). Cette loi avait lancé une polémique sur les chansons mixtes français/langue étrangère, a l'époque de la percée de Khaled, Fodel mais aussi le folklore de Voulzy et sa chanson qui résumait les années rock.
Pluss de contrôle, pluss de novlangue, la même merde: les élites ont peur, ça vacille en haut, le peuple ronchonne (il ne se révolte pas), la boucle continue.
La routine habituelle.
On attend tous de voir le bloc américain s'effondrer et de mesurer les conséquences: une Europe faible et coupable face a un tiers monde revenchard et une Chine/Russie gourmandes, dans un contexte de détérioration de climat, avec populations déplacées et autres sécheresses.
Des bisous et rendez vous dans le prochaine épisode de: triste monde tragique (sick sad world)
Good to hear the French are a people of culture
Oserez-vous pénétrez mon royaume magique ?