A few days ago, Claire was texting with someone and the person had asked about our Christmas trees, wanting to know if they were real. (She had sent a picture and the person remarked that they really looked “real.”)
Claire wanted to respond that they weren’t real, they were “fake,” but she didn’t want to use the word fake and she asked me how to spell the word that meant fake but was pronounced “foh.” I knew immediately what word she was referring to, but neither of us could remember how to spell it. I looked up fake, hoping to find the word in the synonym list but it wasn’t there. I tried a number of similar words like artificial unreal, etc. — but no luck.
Claire responded with fake or artificial, or some such term…. it wasn’t until a couple of days later that it came to her how to spell “Faux.”
Just goes to show you that even the sharpest of brains have “senior moments.”
Faux is a French word that means “fake.” Of course we have perfectly good words like imitation and false, etc. when we want to refer to something as fake — so why use faux at all? Because faux fur, or faux diamonds sounds so much ritzier than fake fur or fake diamonds. Then there’s “faux pas,” which is French for “false step,” or “no-no,” widely used among the witty international set when someone does something “gauche” — French for “clumsy.”
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