As for the “with au jus” thing, here’s an even worse offender:
:dubious:
I think the reason it looks so wrong to Brits and would never appear on a British menu is that most of us are at least passingly familiar with French (being only 20-something miles away from the place) so “au” immediately signals “with” in our minds. In the USA, not so much - but I couldn’t imagine, say, “chilli with con carne” cropping up on a menu over there.
:smack: I misread. I thought you meant French restaurants in America, where the menus were written by English-speakers who had, at best, a passing knowledge of French but still had the urge to pepper the menus with their own linguistic ignorance.
You know, jjimm, I get a similar reaction when I hear someone in English saying “my head hurts!”… right, yeah, it’s not as if someone else’s head can have you in pain unless you’re tallking about having been headbutted and then your pain would be someplace else…
You guys realize this thread is now a likely candidate for the google list of hits for “free potatoes baked with a crust”, right?
Funny, because in the last couple years I’ve noticed that very few restaurants advertise that stuff is “with au jus” anymore. Some places have even changed back from that to simply “au jus”. I’m gladdened by this, as I’m not a prescriptivist, except when a phrase hurts my ears like the redundancy I automatically hear in “with au jus”.
We? Who’s this “we?” I don’t know anyone who thinks it’s correct. Googling “and et cetera” vs. “et cetera” (or “and etc.” vs. etc.) yields the same kind of disproportionate results reported in the OP. Sure, there are some clueless folks who use it, but that doesn’t mean any significant percentage of the population thinks it’s correct.
I’ve not eaten enough authentic French restaurant food to have noticed this one, but it sounds interesting. Is it perhaps used to indicate that the potatoes were cooked with the chicken? (that would kind of make sense), or is it more widespread than that?
No, I think Colophon was just inventing it as an example of a clumsy macaronic construction that would sound just as weird and wrong to American ears as the phrase “with au jus” does to British ears.