A fallout from my 10/17 posting “An underwater Psychiatrist cartoon” (“all about the noun favorite: an implicit superlative, denoting a top-ranking element in some comparison set”), this e-mail from my old friend Benita Bendon Campbell this morning:
the word favoris in French, as you probably know, means ‘sideburns’ and I can’t imagine why
Bonnie, who’s had a long career as a teacher of French, tends to assume that my command of that language is vastly greater than it actually is — a kindly person would say that my knowledge of French is spotty — but in this case, yes, I had a dim recollection of this odd fact, mostly because favoris ‘sideburns’ got borrowed into (British) English, where it enjoyed a brief fashion in the 19th century. Summarized from OED (1972) under the noun favourite, with a colorful cite from Benjamin Disraeli (the British novelist and Prime Minister):
noun favori ‘sideburn’ (usually in plural); 3 19th-century British examples (Disraeli from 1831: His beard, his mustachios, his whiskers, his favoris.) Etymology: a borrowing from French.
So it’s into French that we must go.
