Double Edged expressions

One of the problem of speaking multiple langages is that sometimes things have parallel meanings. While I have no issue understanding expressions that somehow overlap between langages, I noticed I never use some expressions that somehow sound wrong to me. Here are some examples:

Maker Faire
Faire means to make in French, so this sounds very redundant.
Dressed to kill
Dresser means to train in French, and is mainly used with animals, so this does not sound so nice.
Gifted Children
Gift means poison in German and I don’t like the ideas that people have about gifted children anyways.

In some sense, those expressions are similar to multi-lingual garden path sentences, but with the ambiguity at the langage level instead of the gramatical level. Do you have such expressions yourselves?

4 thoughts on “Double Edged expressions”

  1. J’ai le même problème pour “gifted children” pour les mêmes raisons. Ça me choque à chaque fois que je le lis. Bizarrement, le sens allemand ne m’arrive pas au conscient si je lis la version avec le substantif : “he has a gift”.

    Seltsam.

  2. bon mais ca devrait pas être fair, la foire et alors c’est plus gai ?

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