4 ms·
What's the point of saying raison d'être instead of just saying reason? Why did you use a random french phrase here?
by efilife 2y ago
What's the point of saying raison d'être instead of just saying reason? Why did you use a random french phrase here?
- kragen 2y agoit gave me an excuse to use a circumflex
- brabel 2y agoCall the language police!
- efilife 2y agoI just thought it's pointless obfuscation of text, I'm just learning it's apparently a commonly used phrase
- samatman 2y agoYou say here that you're not a native English speaker: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41086473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41086473 Which is fine! Very common on Hacker News. My suggestion is that you approach this kind of question the way you did in that post, not the way you did in this thread. "I'm not a native speaker, why did you say raison d'être there?" would get your question answered without the downvotes. English is a magpie language, and there are dozens to hundreds of undigested phrases borrowed from other languages in it, with more arriving all the time.
- efilife 2y agoYup, it's definitely my fault here. I should have phrased this in a completely different way. Nonetheless, I still think using a foreign phrase is pointless and potentially obfuscates the meaning of a sentence, since we already have english words for that. You are right, my fault for that. English is a dumpster fire sometimes, could have accounted for that
- samatman 2y agoThe point is that "foreign phrase" is a distinct form of English phrase. You can't just toss any bit of any other language into English and expect it to fly. "I like Sally, she's got that joie de vivre", that's fine, "I like Sally's new hairstyle, très chic", also works. "Have you met Sally's new chienne? He's un vrai chéri!" is not English, this is code-switching and would only happen between two bilingual speakers.
- theultdev 2y agoYour first two examples I have no idea what they are without translating. Are you saying English speakers commonly know those first two phrases?
- samatman 2y agoYes. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/joie%20de%20vivre https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/joie%20de%20vivre https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/très_chic https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/très_chic English is a very large language in terms of vocabulary, but I would expect educated people to know joie de vivre and almost anyone to know très chic, although not necessarily how to spell it (and the accent grave is basically an affectation: "proper" English spelling does include various diacritics, but informally it's very rare to actually include them).
- kragen 2y agoi love the orderves
- theultdev 2y agoI think you have a biased view of what is common knowledge. Certainly up north I could see those being known, as it's more likely you had French in highschool. In the south, there are many common Spanish phrases known. I know some French phrases but I have never heard anyone say the ones you mentioned, nor did I know them. I would consider myself "educated".
- brabel 2y agoIt's the same in most languages... the children/teen in Sweden use English phrases as slang :D quite funny to hear (it's several "oh my god", "whatever", "no way" all over... but the swearing seems to remain in their language, interestingly).
- barnabee 2y agoIt’s a phrase of French origin that’s extremely common in English speaking countries, to the extent that it is in both the Oxford and Chambers English dictionaries. Languages evolve, c’est la vie.
- efilife 2y agoI had no idea it's common, first time seeing this phrase used
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 2y agoSome authors have a laisez-faire attitude about reader comprehension.
- keybored 2y agoMaybe they thought that writing <insert words> was more succinct than “the reason why this exists”. <insert words> expresses that sentiment idiomatically (expression) in two words instead of having to add a bunch of words around reason (you can’t just write “the reason for this” since “reason” then becomes too vague). Also you can expect people that both italicize foreign expressions and use the proper diacritics and stuff to prefer a fancy style of writing.
- kragen 2y agoto be perfectly fair i didn't go back and add the italics until after i saw efilife's comment which used them 'reason for being' is a pretty adequate and shorter translation, but it's not valid to write it as 'reason for beinĝ', which makes it a worse alternative. also it isn't a cliché
- keybored 2y agoI like a little flair. Keep being fancy!