One of our newspapers’ unusually imaginative headlines — ‘Michel takes French leave’ — appeared in the Nation on December 15, 2012. The idiom ‘French leave’ refers to any absence (from work, service, such like) without official permission.
In the disciplined services, it is called AWOL. Usually capped, this acronym of the term “Absence Without Leave” refers to any unauthorised absence by an officer from a camp or barracks (even if the soldier does not mean to quit service permanently).
An acronym, incidentally, is a word formed from the initial letters of other words. The physics term “laser” is an acronym of light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation – a device which produces a very narrow but extremely intense light beam used for cutting any extraordinarily hard material.
FRENCH LEAVE
But, although the expression ‘French leave’ refers even to non-French absconders – and, nowadays, even in non-military situations – its deployment by one of the Nation’s sports sub-editors was quite apropos because, in this particular case, the alleged culprit is a real Frenchman. Monsieur Michel is the Gallic soccer maestro who had been hired by Kenya’s football authorities to try – where many other European maestri have miserably failed – to lift Kenya’s Harambee Stars from the abyss of international rivalry. However, M. Michel later satisfactorily explained his absence.
But why does English refer to such an absence as ‘French leave’? Because – during their centuries of deadly commercial and strategic rivalry – England and France tried hard to outdo each other in mutual denigration. Thus, to the English jingo, only a French person is capable of sin as mortal as that. But I reiterate that the deprecation was mutual.
So, in French, the habit of vanishing into thin air is called conge a l’Anglais (‘English leave’). Thus, Monsieur Chauvin – the soldier who, because of his extreme French bigotry, has given us the word chauvinism – might have called it an ‘English holiday’. But why ‘leave’? The noun has two main related senses. As jargon, it is best left to Their Lordships in Willy Mutunga’s domain.
PERMISSION
No court reporter – nobody who passes as a communicator – should ‘enjoy the leave’ to claim that a litigant sought “the magistrate’s leave” to do this or that.
There is then our habitual official excuse from work every year. Many employees will, by mid-December, have applied for and taken their annual leave in order to enjoy Yuletide with their extended families in a bucolic setting.
In all cases, the verb to leave always connotes looseness, licence, freedom, permission, leisure. To leave is to go way (and be ‘at large’); to allow (somebody else) to go away; to release (say, from jail); to relieve (a person of his duties or privileges); to let him loose (from your grip). To go on leave, then, is to free oneself from the daily confines of workplace rigours and discipline.
But take my advice: When in England, never do it like the French and, when in France, never do it like the English – or you may pay extremely heavily for it.
Philip Ochieng is a veteran journalist
