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FROG AS INSULT Americans, Canadians, and Brits all use the racist insult frog to disparage a citizen of France or a French-Canadian. What is the origin of this abusive term? The insult is of British provenance. About one dozen explanations of “frog” exist, most of them glutinous with the specious stickum of folk etymology, that is, bad guesses by semi-literate “experts,” the sort of twit who wishes to pontificate while knowing full well that he or she knows nothing of the term’s history and so is free to make it up. Would you like an educated guess by someone who has studied terms of racist abuse for forty years? My immediate guess, without checking any other source ideas, is that the insult frog arose as a misheard sneer. It begins with some Old-English-speaking peasant who knows no French, one who knows no history, does not know that France means ‘land of the Franks.’ This Anglo-Saxon may have heard repeated post-conquest references in a Norman phrase such as les Francs à Londres ‘those French in London.’ Francs in a very nasal pronunciation could be easily misheard as frog by a listener who NEVER heard of Frank except as a personal name. Thus the insulter of French people must have said ‘frog’ when in fact he said, “Les Francs.” Remember the final /s/ is silent and /an/ is nasal. Frog! That’s my learned guess. It may well hark back to the Norman invasion of England in 1066 CE. Remember that the language of the court, of the law, immediately became French, while the conquered peasants continued to speak only their native Anglo-Saxon or Old English. The massive influx of French words that entered English after the conquest did take time to seep into our language and alter even the sound of our tongue, not to mention increasing our stock of words.
Etymology of Frank & France The Franks were a Germanic group of people who conquered Gaul in the sixth century CE. The French never like to be reminded that the name of their country is pure German. The Franks were named for their weapon of choice, the franca, a Teutonic javelin. Just as the Saxons of Anglo-Saxon renown were named for their favorite weapon, the seax ‘knife.’ The Saxons were the people of the knife, as the Franks were the people of the javelin.
Les Francs! Here, on the subject of the origin of frog as a racist insult, are some other harvests of supposition winnowed from the chaff that litters the internet: 1. “In World War II, Frenchmen were fighting alongside Englishmen. When the time to eat came along, the French people would eat frog legs. Well, as you can imagine, it was not really the English soldiers’ way of having a meal and hence they started calling the French ‘Frogs’.” Yeah, I kin jes’ imagine, you clueless buffoon. So you posit that English soldiers in 1942 did not know that Frenchmen ate frog legs. Then how come a reference to the French eating frog legs appears almost 700 years before World War II, in the Middle English poem Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. And then references to the French eating frog legs pepper English print for the next seven hundred years. No, dearie, don’t bother looking up any references. They would merely cloud what’s left of your mind. 2. Want another preposterous folk story? Read on. “In World War II, the French soldiers were pretty good at hiding from the German soldiers. With all their camouflage, they evidently looked like frogs. When the German soldiers tried to find them, they said, “Darn those Frenchmen, we can't find them anywhere.” Yep, darn them Frenchies. What utter ignorance! How come, just to cite one of thousands of examples, in 1778 CE, in a novel by the British writer Fanny Burney, a character says to an impertinent French person, “Hark you, Mrs. Frog.” 3. “According to a history book entitled Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the earliest Frankish kings (Clovis I) used both bees and frogs on their royal robes. Both have been found in royal gravesites of Clovis and sons in France.” [My note: No, they have not. No froggies in the boneyard!]
This is the pure unadulterated ignorance upon which I dote. No such frog on a king’s garment has ever been discovered. You think it likely that French royalty who caused to be invented so many examples of beauteous regal raiment would stoop to put frogs on their kingly robes? There is not a scrap of evidence, in print, in pictures or in stone for such a silly notion. Here's another spurious citation: “It is said that, at his coronation, Clovis caused the black frogs (!) on his robes to be altered to become fleurs-de-lis.” Clovis did no such thing. The fleur-de-lys or fleur-de-lis had been a Frankish symbol when Clovis was only a prankish twinge of lust under his daddy’s coverlet. 4. Here is speculation with a smidgeon of verifiable history as its basis. “The term was coined by the French nobility as a disparaging monicker for the inhabitants of Paris. The land surrounding Paris was notoriously swampy and the 18th century kings and courtiers of Versailles habitually referred to the Parisians as LES GRENOUILLES (the frogs). Foreign diplomats picked it up and translated it.” Now it is true that one of the prominent neighborhoods of current-day Paris is Le Marais (French ‘swampy ground’). This explanation is possible but not likely, due to the time frame. The expressions appears to be in English hundreds of years before the French revolution. By the way, Le Marais shares the common Germanic root source of our English word marsh. An earlier spelling, now obsolete in English, was marish. Cognates are, as pointed out in The Oxford English Dictionary, “Anglo-Norman mareis, marreis, marrais, mereis, mareschei and Middle French mares, marez, marais, marest marsh (12th cent. in Old French; earlier maresc, maresch (1086 in a post-classical Latin text); French marais) < post-classical Latin mariscus, marisca, marescus (as noun, from late 7th cent. in British sources, from 8th cent. in documents from the Low Countries; also as adjective from 1230 in British sources), ultimately < the Germanic base of
The Marais district in the centre of Paris 5. “It is said that Queen Elizabeth I of England adored frogs and was accustomed to call a close friend by that affectionate name. The Queen as a young woman had become smitten with a young and handsome ambassador of France. Elizabeth referred to him as her ‘Dearest Frog.’ ” This Elizabethan anecdote merely clarifies the expression’s vitality and use in English near the end of the sixteenth century, long before World War II. I think. The lesson here is that a little research in authentic sources (as opposed to pubs and bar-room floors) goes a long way. But, in reading these “expert” internet opinions, NEVER underestimate the ubiquity of public ignorance.
Queen Elizabeth I in the van den Meulen portrait
copyright © 2012 William Gordon Casselman
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