“Argument with boyfriend: He said something was ‘au gratis’. I said he was saying it wrong. He’s confusing ‘gratis’ with ‘au gratin’. Who’s, right?”
Well, I thought she was, but a quick Google search shows just over 4,000 entries that use the phrase “au gratis”. Then I realized that 4,000 was a very small number on Google, particularly when you consider that there are 677,000,000 entries for “gratis”.
Hmmm, I thought. Who would know the answer? DOPERS, THAT’S WHO!
I’m still inclined to think that this guy is confusing “free” with “crunchy topping”, but now I’m slightly less positive.
Google isn’t amazing useful for this - many thousands of errors find their way onto the web each hour. When asked, Google will reliably find and report them, just as if they were valid.
Checking Google was okay for a start, but given the results you got, a follow-through was called for. You need to keep in mind that anyone can post anything on the internet and plenty of idiots will copy it. For follow-through, look them up in a dictionary. You’ll find “gratis.” You’ll find “au gratin.” You won’t find “au gratis,” because it doesn’t exist other than in than in the confusion generated in some folks’ minds. And in the repitition of that confusion that the net provides.
Because it’s a French phrase. I don’t think it’s been assimilated fully into English - and even if it had, surely it should keep its original grammatical integrity - same as how we deem “and et cetera” to be incorrect.
(The bit that gets me on French menus is when they say stuff like “poulet avec ses pommes de terre” - “chicken with its potatoes”. Like the chicken owned them before it was killed.)
In my part of the world it has. The words ‘beef’, ‘mutton’, ‘pork’, and ‘venison’ all had similar paths into the language: All were from French, and all changed their sense (from an animal to meat from that animal) when they were assimilated into English.
But that isn’t what’s happening. ‘Au jus’ is, or is becoming, a noun describing a specific kind of sauce, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it eventually became a single word ‘aujus’, pronounced /awjew’/ or similar, and not taking a plural, much like ‘mustard’ or ‘ketchup’.
This is wrong: French is a different language and when non-F1s butcher it they are merely reflecting their own ignorance, as opposed to a larger trend.
That may be annoying (I actually think it’s kind of charming) but it is at least authentically French. Menus in France are full of that particular construction.
