Echo of False Friends
It has just occurred to me that the word ’start-up’, as it refers to a couple of geeks in a garage with an idea, so iconic of the froth years of the internet, creator of such success and so many failures, is such a powerful myth in France.
Here in France, it has become the word used to fill the unfortunate void created when the word ‘entrepreneur’, which was coined right here many years ago, was quickly abandoned by frenchpersonnes because of its irrelevance to anything that could ever actually happen under the French economic rulebook.
What fascinates about all this is that although frenchpersonnes talk, rather wistfully, about ’start-ups’ all the time, most of them are actually thinking to themselves, ‘up-starts’.
So they got the syllables right but just reversed them. Faux amis, indeed.
