Promiscuity

Today I want to write about a topic that interests me a great deal, because I live it daily and it has an impact on my life and those around me.

Living in France and being constantly between English and French (English at home, French outside), one comes into contact with many accidental jokes and examples of that morphological and syntactical category when one is learning or speaking a second language: the false friend, or, in French, faux amis.

English was extensively influenced by the French language and, over the centuries, many words see their semantic value change -- sometimes drastically-- giving rise to a significant number of misunderstandings, several of them hilarious.

Between Portuguese and Spanish, we have such examples as well (i.e. embarazada- pregnant in Spanish, embarrassed in Portuguese), and these shifts can occur even within two varieties of the same language (i.e. fila: line or queue in Brazilian Port but gay in Portuguese Port).

The fun comes when one is certain a word in the Target Language means the same as it does in the Source Language (when it doesn't), so that it is inserted in a formal way, and when a native speaker comes across the word in a phrase or sentence, s/he is utterly perplexed.

I enjoy collecting these examples, and recently I was told about one I had never heard about. It might be the best instance of Linguistic False Friendship I ever came across. 

Most people in Paris live in promiscuity. At least they think they do.

   

When a native English speaker hears this, as was the case with a friend of mine recently, she becomes concerned, especially when the context involves children.  She was told her friend had people over, people with lots of kids, and they had to put the kids in the same bedroom, which, according to her, caused a lot of "promiscuity".    

Concise Oxford-Hachette French Dictionary © 2009 Oxford University Press:

promiscuité /pʀɔmiskɥite/

feminine noun

lack of privacy.

This is the first meaning of the word in French!

Here's another fav of mine (English/Dutch False Friend):

"Mom, that one, that one, that one..."

I love false friends.