Why do we use the word fiancé in English?

Buying my fiancee a greeting card with the words betrothed or intended on would make me feel like a dick.

It sounds fancy as hell that’s why.

Besides, we borrow TONS of words from other languages as it is, why should fiance by any different.

Cest la vie

Everything sounds more romantic in French.

Ha, you remember that Fawlty Towers episode @Blueroses, the one where the French girl flirts with Basil?

@ucme Of course! Mrs. Peignoir!
Basil: Please don’t alarm yourself, it’s only my wife laughing. I’m afraid her local finishing school was bombed.
Mrs. Peignoir: Oh dear!
Basil: No, no, not really. Just a thought.

So funny when he tested the pulse of her window whilst up that ladder.
Her accent was sooooooo sexy though.

“The Wedding Party” That was a great episode. What am I saying? They’re all brilliant episodes! But yeah, I’d do Mrs. Peignoir too.

Yeah, an enduring classic, never tire of seeing each masterpiece of comedy gold.

For the same reasons we use:

boudoir
pegnoir
armoire
chauffeur
ballet
cache
corduroy
coupon
denim
debris
detour
diplomat
etiquette

For the gazillion borrowed or loan words from 146 different languages that have migrated to English,
read here.

A few, for example, from Hindi:

bangle
cheetah
chintz
cot
dungaree
jodjhpurs
jung;e
punch
pundit
sari
sentry
shampoo

It sounds classier and more romantic to American ears… and you know how huge a pachyderm’s ears are.

edit: jodhpurs, jungle (laptop and wrong glasses)

Because it’s easier to say that.

Because we’re a melting pot of people, food, culture, religious beliefs and language. It’s the best part of being here.

It’s much easier in casual conversation to make reference to “my fiancé” than “my betrothed”; whereas, “my intended” just sounds odd.

@gailcalled That’s a fun list, but there is no other English word for many of the items on it, and others have connotations that the English word doesn’t. So no, we don’t use fiancé for the same reasons (read the original question).

It’s weird: the French word has become the normal word. If you use the plain Anglo-Saxon betrothed instead of the French, you might sound pedantic or pretentious, and if you use the Latin-derived intended, you might sound like a country bumpkin. It’s all backwards.

I was talking about word origins in a college class a while back, and some of my students said they had never heard the word betrothed or even seen it in print.

@submariner you are so funny! I can think of other words for words on @gailcalled list. English is a bastardised language where it has borrowed loads of words from other languages. Even our sentence structure has changed. It used to be that we used Thee, Thou, and other proper pronouns, but that has gone out of use. (In Scandinavian languages we still use them…) Also, it used to be bad form to end a sentence in a preposition, but we simply don’t speak that way any more so we can end a sentence with ‘of’, or ‘in’ or ‘by’ or ‘to’.

Language has more to do with fashion and trends than anyone really cares to think about. All you need to do is read a book from the 1920’s and you can hear how odd the word usage and slang they used back then sounds to us now. Fiancée and Fiancé are just two examples of words that sound more modern at the moment to us English speakers. It probably has something to do with a market research company finding out that if those words are used in advertising of engagement rings, people will spend 20% more on the rings or some such cynical reason as that.

I was going to say that sentry is the only item on that list that exemplifies what I’m talking about: a loan word that has completely displaced one or more perfectly serviceable native words for the same thing. But it turns out that sentry is not a loan word at all, or so say the dictionaries I consulted. The origin is uncertain, but it’s probably from English and not from Hindi.

Most people have no idea what they are heading into, going into marriage, and using a mysterious and foreign word for your ‘other’ is appropriate for that.