Terms of engagement

Saturday's Times carried a letter in which some "matrons in the Shires" took issue with Giles Coren's references to his "girlfriend", when the pair had already announced their engagement. "Esther is rather more than a "girlfriend" now," they chided, the inference being that her future husband ought to acknowledge her instead as his fiancée . Mr Coren's response was short and eloquent: "Yes, but 'fiancée' is such a horrid word...".

The word "fiancé(e)" is one which evokes strong emotions, not all of them romantic. As long ago as 1949, the novelist Angela Thirkell wrote testily about "the dreadful word fiancée...what we can do about it we really do not know".

What can we do about it? Some people, like the columnist above, avoid it altogether and refer to their girlfriend or boyfriend as just that until they are married. Some accommodate it through feats of mispronunciation - like my colleague who pronounces it to rhyme with séance - while others reach for the thesaurus and dust off alternatives such as betrothed or intended.

What puzzles me is why it causes such awkwardness. I have seen it accused of being pretentious and of sounding like a "middle manager at a high street bank". But the most probable explanation is that, as a French loan word which has not been anglicised* in any way, it sounds strained and unnatural in English. It may also carry a whiff of genteelism, if the example of other French borrowings like "serviette" is anything to go by.

* One of the posters here refers to her father, who in "inimitable West Virginia fashion" pronounced the word as “fi-ancy” ("fi" as in hi-fi). To me, this sounds much better.

Just deserts

An email in which my friend described the delicious praline he had enjoyed for desert reminded me of how commonly these two words - desert and dessert - are confused, most frequently in the phrase "just deserts" (and it is "deserts", not "desserts", despite what Dogberry thinks).

It is remarkable how often people get this wrong. Over the last year, there have been 90 references in British newspapers to "just deserts" but 53 to "just desserts". Stripping out the inevitable puns in restaurant reviews, recipe pages, and an intriguing report about a local council which insisted that Spotted Dick be renamed Spotted Richard, we are still left with more than 20 instances of incorrect usage.

This does not seem to be a simple case of misspelling, rather a widespread assumption that the phrase is some sort of food metaphor, like "revenge is a dish best served cold", or "taste of one's own medicine" (I know, medicine isn't food, precisely, but you get the picture). This is compounded by the confusing fact that "desert" is in this case pronounced like "dessert" and not like the sandy sort of desert.

In fact, the "desert" in "just deserts" has nothing to do with sand or pudding, but comes from the Old French deservir and means something which is deserved, "a due reward or recompense".

In England, at least, the word "dessert" also raises questions of class. There is a lingering sense that "pudding" is somehow socially preferable, which I think may be something to do with Nancy Mitford.