Frenchery is a somewhat dismissive British collective noun for French fashions, manners, or cultural affectations — treating French style as an excessive package deal.
Frenchery is a somewhat dismissive British collective noun for French fashions, manners, or cultural affectations — treating French style as an excessive package deal. The '-ery' suffix (as in 'tomfoolery,' 'knavery') carries a whiff of mockery, framing French influence as affected or overdone. Dated and literary in register, encountered mainly in 19th-century British writing. It reflects historical English ambivalence toward French cultural dominance in matters of taste and fashion.
The hostess had decked the room in what her husband sourly called frenchery — gilded chairs, silk curtains, the works.
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The aesthetic vocabulary of how people dress now — quiet luxury, coquette, mob wife, coastal grandmother, Y2K core, and every "-core" that came after.
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(slang, sometimes, derogatory) A native or resident of France, or a francophone, or a person of French lineage.
(informal) With an exaggerated French manner.
(Scotland, Geordie, Northern England) ; bother; annoyance.
A word with two very different lives. In its tamer sense, Frenchified means made more French in style, manner, or character — perhaps overly refined, fashion-forward, or affected with French cultural airs. In older, more vulgar historical slang, it was a euphemism for having contracted a sexually transmitted infection, reflecting old British prejudices that blamed the French for the spread of syphilis. Today the word mostly survives in its cultural sense, used humorously to describe someone who has gone a bit too Parisian.
(slang) French fashions collectively.