May I have a word about… our love affair with the French language | Jonathan Bouquet

We Brits are happy to assimilate French words, so why do they find it so hard to reciprocate?

There's nothing quite so guffaw-making to an Anglo-Saxon sensibility in need of its funny bone being tickled than a French worthy having a fit of the vapours.

Last week didn't disappoint. And all over the delightful word "love". Apparently, French online advertisers prefer it to "l'amour", which has got the culture minister, Franck Riester, in a right royal Gallic tizzy. "In this linguistic globalisation, our duty is to refuse any tendency to move towards a single [world] language [and] any weakening of the diversity, as of cultures, in France and elsewhere."