Et voilá!

No need to pardon our French! We use these expressions every day

Image: Etienne Girardet

Did you know you’re probably speaking French without even realizing it? That’s right! From wine to wardrobes, French and its elegance have slipped into our everyday conversations, with words and expressions that make us feel très sophisticated. If you’ve ever met a sommelier, or if you’ve bought a prêt-à-porter item for that special summer holiday, these French words have had your back without you even noticing. Let’s explore these borrowed terms, uncover their origins, and see how they’ve seamlessly blended into our English chatter. Grab your beret, it’s time to feel fancy!

Image: Anton Mislawsky

Ever wondered who that poised, polished person recommending wine at a fancy restaurant is? That’s your sommelier: A wine expert whose job is to make you look like a connoisseur without lifting a finger.

The word comes from Old French, originally referring to someone who managed wine supplies. These days, it’s all about pairing your steak with the perfect cabernet. Who doesn’t love a nice pairing? Cheers to that, or to put it better, santé!

Image: Aneta Pawlik

What’s purple, pear-shaped, and sounds way fancier in French? The aubergine, of course! While Americans call it eggplant, the French (and British too) stick with "aubergine," a word derived from Arabic and filtered through French.

It’s a favorite in dishes like ratatouille, making it a star of French cuisine. Even if you’re not a fan of its slightly spongy texture, you have to admit the name gives it an air of culinary sophistication. Saying "aubergine" instead of "eggplant" just makes you feel fancier, don’t you think?

Image: Camille Brodard

We don’t know about you, but this one puts a smile on us just when reading it. A "boutique" isn’t just any old shop; it’s a small, stylish space brimming with unique finds.

The word literally means "shop" in French, but here, it’s used to describe those cozy little stores that make you want to browse for hours.

On a similar note, its use in tourism has grown popular, since "boutique hotels" are small but exclusive accommodations. You see? It only takes a French word to make it luxurious!

Image: Austin Tate

You probably use this one more than you think. Why, you may ask? Because it’s not the same to say something is small as to say something is "petite."

Used in all kinds of contexts, like a dainty piece of jewelry, a tiny home, or even someone who is of a smaller height, it sprinkles the object with elegance.

Fun fact: In French, "petite" is the feminine form, while "petit" is masculine. Either way, it’s proof that good things often come in small (and chic) packages.

Image: Joshua Rodriguez

Hiring an au pair isn’t just about childcare; it’s about cultural exchange, and it’s quite a common practice in our country.

This French term means "on equal terms," highlighting the idea that au pairs become part of the family while they’re learning the language and helping out at the house.

It originated in Europe, but the tradition has spread worldwide. If you’ve ever met an au pair, you know they’re like a babysitter, language tutor, and cultural ambassador all rolled into one. Très international!

Image: Laura Gariglio

Chauffeur is a word that screams luxury, doesn’t it? Well, it’s more luxurious than saying "taxi driver." This French term originally meant "stoker," referring to the person who kept early steam-powered cars running.

Nowadays, it’s all about a nice ride and comfort, and even if it is more commonly used to talk about a private chauffeur, it can also describe public transport drivers. So, we can say we all have one, right?

Image: Florian Siedl

Whether you’re stuck on a crossword puzzle or facing a tricky decision, you might need an impasse. That is, take a break, breathe in, and face the fact that there’s no clear solution at that point.

This word is French for "dead end," which feels fitting when you’re going in circles, right? Thankfully, most impasses are temporary; give it time, and you’ll find a way forward. And hey, using a fancy word to describe your predicament might just make it feel a little less frustrating.

Image: Clark Street Mercantile

Prêt-à-porter is fashion talk for clothes you can buy off the rack. Literally meaning "ready to wear," it’s the opposite of haute couture (also French), where outfits are custom-made.

This term gained popularity in the mid-20th century as fashion houses began offering stylish yet accessible options for the masses.

All the clothes we buy today are prêt-à-porter; who needs a tailor when the French have already thought of everything?

Image: Helcim Payments

If you’ve ever been to a hotel, you’ve met a concierge. Need dinner reservations, theater tickets, or directions to the best local café? They’ve got you covered.

The word itself comes from Old French, meaning "keeper of keys," which makes sense given their knack for unlocking great experiences. Don’t forget to tip them, and your stay will go smoothly!

Image: Nathanaël Desmeules

Ever get into a playful debate and have to admit your opponent made a zinger of a point? That’s when you drop a well-timed "touché."

Borrowed from fencing, where it means "touched," this French term signals that someone has landed a verbal hit. Kind of like saying "Mic-drop," you know? When you say it, you’re allowed to feel a little smug afterward; it’s all part of the fun.

Image: Nick Fewings

In French, chapeau means "hat," but it’s also a way of saying "well done" or "kudos." And if you’re wondering what these two concepts have to do with each other, think of the tip-of-the-cap gesture we do when we want to acknowledge someone’s effort or brilliance.

Like many other expressions, using the foreign version gives it an extra something, especially if it is a compliment! Plus, it’s fun to say. Try it out, and you’ll feel like you’re straight out of a Parisian café.

Animal world

The horse that could read, the cat that solved a crime, and more

There’s a sled dog that battled a blizzard to deliver medicine, a horse that solved math problems, a cloned sheep, and that’s just the beginning. Some major events in history didn’t have people as their protagonists, but animals, and their stories deserve to be read. Here are 10 remarkable animals that changed science, war, medicine, and even the future of human flight.

It’s not uncommon to see cute animals perform impressive tricks, and there are even talent shows specifically for animals. But more than a century ago, one remarkable horse stunned Americans by appearing to read, spell, and solve math problems.

Beautiful Jim Key was born in Tennessee in 1889 and was trained by Dr. William Key, who had been born enslaved in 1833 and taught himself veterinary medicine after emancipation. Key noticed the young horse watching him play fetch with a dog and decided to see what else the animal could pick up. Using patience instead of harsh methods, Dr. Key taught Jim to recognize letters, numbers, and words well enough to amaze crowds across the country. The horse debuted in 1897 at the Tennessee Centennial Exposition in Nashville. He could spell simple words, identify coins, operate a cashier, and hand back correct change to customers. President William McKinley watched him perform and called it one of the most astonishing exhibitions he had ever seen.

Detective shows lovers know that tiny clues can crack a case wide open. Fingerprints, footprints, and stray hairs have solved countless mysteries. In 1994, a criminal case was broken through due to a cat’s hair.

In 1994, Prince Edward Island, Canada, became the setting for one of forensic science’s most unusual breakthroughs. After the murder of Shirley Duguay, investigators found white cat hairs on a bloodstained jacket belonging to the natural suspect, Douglas Beamish, her partner. Tucked inside the lining were 27 strands of long white fur. Those hairs matched Snowball, Duguay’s pet cat, through DNA extracted from the fur. It marked the first criminal conviction in which non-human DNA played a decisive role. The case demonstrated that animal DNA could connect suspects to crime scenes just as effectively as human evidence. Snowball never knew he was helping detectives, but it was his fur that changed forensic investigations forever.

During wartime, a missed message could cost hundreds of lives. Long before radios became dependable on the battlefield, armies often relied on an unlikely messenger that could succeed when every other method had failed.

Cher Ami was a homing pigeon serving with the American Expeditionary Forces during WWI. In October 1918, more than 550 American soldiers of the "Lost Battalion" became trapped in France’s Argonne Forest and were mistakenly shelled by their own artillery. Major Charles Whittlesey had already lost two messenger pigeons to enemy fire when he released his last bird, a Black Check cock named Cher Ami, carrying a note begging American gunners to stop the barrage. Despite being shot through the chest, blinded in one eye, and nearly losing a leg, Cher Ami completed the flight carrying the desperate message that identified the battalion's true position. The shelling stopped, and roughly 194 soldiers survived the ordeal. The pigeon received the French Croix de Guerre, and her body is displayed at the Smithsonian Institution.

If you were watching the news in February 1997, you probably remember the day this story broke. Dolly was born on July 5, 1996, at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, though her existence stayed under wraps until researchers published their findings the following year.

She had been created by scientists Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell from a single cell taken from the udder of a six-year-old Finn Dorset ewe using a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer. Before Dolly, scientists believed adult cells were too specialized to create an entirely new animal. Her successful birth proved otherwise and became one of the greatest breakthroughs in modern biology. Dolly went on to live an ordinary-looking life at Roslin, grazing alongside other sheep and eventually giving birth to six lambs of her own. She passed in 2003, at age six, and her body is now preserved and on permanent display at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, where she remains one of the most visited exhibits in the building.

If you need a medicine today, you probably walk a few blocks, get to your local chemist, and get it. However, in 1925, the inhabitants of Nome, Alaska, suffered a whole lot more than that to get some life-saving medicine, and the hero behind the story is a dog.

That year, a diphtheria outbreak threatened the people in Nome, one of the most isolated communities in the country. With airplanes grounded by brutal weather and sea routes frozen solid, officials organized an emergency relay of about 150 dogs and 20 mushers to transport lifesaving antitoxin across nearly 700 miles of Alaska. Balto is the dog that led the final 53-mile stretch through blinding snow and powerful winds, guiding musher Gunnar Kaasen safely into Nome on February 2, 1925. Although many teams contributed to the famous Serum Run, Balto became the public face of the mission. His achievement was celebrated with parades, newspaper headlines, and even a bronze statue in NYC’s Central Park.

Hot air balloons today are pretty common, but in the 18th century, they were a brand new invention, and no one really knew whether living creatures could survive the journey into the sky. Before risking human passengers, the Montgolfier brothers, French paper manufacturers from a small town in the south of France, decided to let a few animals go first.

Montauciel, whose name means "Climb to the Sky," was a sheep selected by the Montgolfier brothers for a historic balloon experiment in 1783. Accompanied by a duck and a rooster, the sheep lifted off from the grounds of the Palace of Versailles before King Louis XVI, Queen Marie Antoinette, and thousands of spectators. The balloon climbed roughly 1,500 feet and traveled about two miles before landing safely. Finding the animals unharmed reassured scientists that high-altitude flight was possible for living creatures. Just a few months later, on November 21, 1783, humans made the first free hot air balloon flight.

Everything around the FIFA World Cup revolves around taking home that golden cup and keeping it for the next four years. Imagine the chaos it must have been when the Jules Rimet Trophy was lost just before the tournament started in England in 1966.

Weeks before England was set to host the tournament, the Jules Rimet Trophy was stolen in broad daylight from a stamp exhibition at Westminster Central Hall in London, lifted from a display case despite a team of guards posted nearby. For a whole week, investigators looked for it, but couldn’t find it. On March 27, a week after the robbery, a Londoner named David Corbett was heading out for an evening walk with his four-year-old collie mix, Pickles, when the dog stopped to sniff a package tucked under a garden hedge near their home. Wrapped in a newspaper was the missing trophy. Corbett became a suspect for a brief time, but after all doubts about him were cleared, Pickles became an international celebrity, appearing on television, attending banquets, and even receiving a year's supply of dog food.

Many people grew up believing that making tools was what separated humans from every other living creature. But in the forests of East Africa, one chimpanzee challenged that belief without ever realizing how important his actions would become.

In 1960, while studying chimpanzees in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park, researcher Jane Goodall observed an adult male chimp she named David Greybeard poking a stem of grass into a termite mound, pulling it out coated in insects, and eating them straight off the stalk. Days later, she watched him strip the leaves off a twig first, shaping it into a more effective tool. Goodall reported her findings, and the discovery forced experts to rethink what it meant to be human. Greybeard became one of the most famous chimpanzees in scientific history and helped transform the study of animal intelligence.

If you own a small dog, you know how amazing their ability to squeeze into tiny places is. During WWII, that simple ability turned one Yorkshire Terrier into an unlikely military hero whose size helped save lives.

Smoky was discovered in 1944 inside an abandoned foxhole in New Guinea by American soldiers. Weighing only about four pounds, she soon became the companion of Corporal William Wynne. During the fighting in the Philippines, engineers needed to run telephone wire through a narrow, 70-foot pipe beneath an airfield without exposing workers to enemy fire. Smoky was small enough to pull the line through while following her owner, sparing dozens of soldiers from dangerous work under attack. After the war, Wynne began bringing Smoky to visit wounded soldiers in military hospitals, and the effect she had on morale was so noticeable that historians now regard her as the first documented therapy dog. She lived until 1957 and is buried in Ohio, where a small statue marks the spot.

Visiting the zoo is a fun activity; kids love the thrill of seeing a wild animal up close. But people don’t usually think about how difficult life can be for animals raised by people, out of their own habitat. One lioness changed public attitudes about that and inspired millions to care about wildlife conservation.

In 1956, a Kenyan man named George Adamson made a tragic mistake by taking a lioness’ life in self-defense, only to discover she had been protecting three newborn cubs hidden nearby. Two of the cubs were sent to a zoo in the Netherlands, but the smallest, a female Adamson and his wife Joy named Elsa, stayed behind with the couple. Rather than raising her in captivity, the couple gradually taught her to hunt and live independently before releasing her into the wild. Joy later wrote "Born Free," published in 1960, which became an international bestseller and inspired the Academy Award-winning 1966 film of the same name. Elsa's story introduced countless readers and moviegoers to the importance of protecting Africa's wildlife while demonstrating that careful rewilding could succeed under the right conditions.