‘French,’ cried my husband. ‘It’s bloody French.’ We were clicking on a computer screen in response to the dear old Telegraph’s invitation to ‘test out your etymological knowledge’. The little game accompanied news of an exhibition in London called The English Effect, mounted by the British Council. I had already got one of the 20 questions wrong, because I didn’t know the origin of honcho and clicked on the option ‘Mexican’ (whatever that means) instead of Japanese. In a way honcho is American, having been ‘brought back from Japan by fliers stationed there during the occupation and during the Korean fighting’, according to the journal American Speech in 1955, as I discovered later.
Anyway, my husband, glorying in my failure with honcho, was roaring the Frenchness of the word cravat. To spite him, I clicked on ‘Lithuanian’.
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