Un mot by any other nom

Living in a bilingual household, and I must confess to being the least bilingual of the five, I am daily exposed to two vocabularies, English and French. Perhaps it’s my anglophone outsider’s perspective, but certain words in French just seem far nicer than the things they represent.

Take the everyday term la poubelle; French for garbage. The pou part is perfectly in character. It’s that belle (or beautiful) inside that seems to oppose the notion of the fly-catching bin at the end of your driveway. Picture rubbish in ballet slippers. Worth a smile, every time you say it.

Or la mouffette. Can you think of a more unlikely word for skunk? It’s rather like an endearment from Pepé Lepew (“Ah, ma petite mouffette….”), far removed from the real-life stinky critter living under the back yard shed. Being sprayed by a mouffette makes me think of being daubed by baby powder.

One of my favorite French words is pneu for tire. This is far more fun to say in French than you’d think to see it on the page because, unlike English (think pneumatic and pneumonia), the “p” here isn’t silent. In French, pneu is a small, delicate, front of the mouth word. It’s far less chewy and, let’s face it, less rubbery in the mouth than tire – especially in the polysyllabic way English-speakers sometimes pronounce it: tie-yer. Really, though, if I stop to consider the etymology, pneu is perfectly logical.

And all this got me thinking. Are there English words that have the same effect; that seem to be the opposite of what they stand for? I may be too close to the language to quickly see this from the other side.

My francophone husband suggests dysentery. Hmmm. I’m not convinced it quite does the trick. However, I now recall that our eldest daughter once suggested Saliva as a potential name for her baby sister – she was six, and thought it sounded pretty. That comes close. Perhaps so does sweetbreads, which is what a pancreas becomes when you fry it up for breakfast.

How about it… suggestions?