Whenever someone utters some profanity – almost always words we have heard before – and follows it by “pardon my French,” my first thought is that what they said is not French. Sometimes I even say that. This is not just something that bugs me, but I wanted to know where it came from. It seems to have evolved from a general animosity between the English and the French. The context for this expression is that anything coarse or vulgar is French. But it makes no sense that Americans say this.
Pardon My French
