100 Beautiful Sentences

1. “Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.”

– Michael Chabon

2. “Jack put his arm out the window, waving his hat like a visiting dignitary, backed into the street, and floated away, gentling the gleaming dirigible through the shadows of arching elm trees, light dropping on it through their leaves like confetti as it made its ceremonious passage.”

– Marilynne Robinson

3. “A sudden warm rainstorm washes down in sweet hyphens.”

– J.M. Ledger

4. “And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it.”

– Paul Harding

5. “Within seconds of that thought, the train entered Washington, where she was to come to her end more than sixty-eight years later, a mother to seven living and two dead, a grandmother to twenty-one living and three dead, a great-grandmother to twelve, a great-great grandmother to twins.”

– Edward P. Jones

6. “We were all a little drunk with spring, like the fat bees reeling from flower to flower, and a strange insurrectionary current ran among us.”

– Tobias Wolff

8. “When he was dry, he believed it was alcohol he needed, but when he had a few drinks in him, he knew it was something else, possibly a woman; and when he had it all — cash, booze, and a wife — he couldn’t be distracted from the great emptiness that was always falling through him and never hit the ground.”

– Denis Johnson

9. “Lizards skit like quick beige sticks.”

– Richard Beard

10. “Saint Rufina, a famous woman who had been a very lovely young princess with long black hair who decided to give up her jewelry and become a nun and wear only the roughest clothes, and who died in a terrible way, by being eaten to death by wild dogs that ran through the church in the dead of wintertime, was in a special chapel all to herself, where one arm of her was set aside, that someone had scooped up and saved from the dogs, because everyone had loved her for her kindness and her healing ability.”

– Nicholson Baker

11. “I heard the sonic rip of a military jet, like a giant trowel being dragged through wet concrete, but saw only blue above, a raw and saturated blue that seemed cut from an inner wedge of sky.”

– Rachel Kushner

12. “The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.”

– Roberto Bolano

13. “His voice traveled like a drug dripped down the spiraling canals of their ears until they had forgotten everything, until they had forgotten their own names, until they turned and offered themselves up to him, their bodies sweet and soft as marzipan.”

– Ann Patchett

14. “Men are like armored things, mountainous assemblages of armor and leather, masonry even, which you are told will self-dismantle if you touch the right spot, and out will flow passionate attention.”

– Norman Rush

15. “We waited for the taxi beside the Holderlin pump, and by the faint light that fell from the living-room window into the well I saw, with a shudder that went to the roots of my hair, a beetle rowing across the surface of the water, from one dark shore to the other.”

– W.G. Sebald

16. “On the ground, in the cave, now wrapped in darkness, they found themselves airborne over hills and valleys, floating through blue clouds to the mountaintop of pure ecstasy, from where, suspended in space, they felt the world go round and round, before they descended, sliding down a rainbow, toward the earth, their earth, where the grass, plants, and animals seemed to be singing a lullaby of silence as Nyawira and Kamiti, now locked in each other’s arms, slept the sleep of babies, the dawn of a new day awaiting.”

– Ngugi Wa Thiong’o

17. “Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.”

– Jose Saramago

18. “The Captain’s wife played the harp; she had very long arms, silver as eels on those nights, and armpits as dark and mysterious as sea urchins; and the sound of the harp was sweet and piercing, so sweet and piercing it was almost unbearable, and we were forced to let out long cries, not so much to accompany the music as to protect our hearing from it.”

– Italo Calvino

19. “Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish.”

– Gabriel Garcia Marquez

20. “In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.”

– Alice Munro

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21. “The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.”

Elena Ferrante

22. “In any case, at a certain point as she wandered out among the galaxies, among the whirling particles and ineffable numbers, something leaked in her mind, smudging the text of the cosmos, and she was lost.”

– Deborah Eisenberg

23. “And I still have other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain.”

– Vladimir Nabokov

24. “In our world, that’s the way you live your grown-up life: you must constantly rebuild your identity as an adult, the way it’s been put together is wobbly, ephemeral, and fragile, it cloaks despair and, when you’re alone in front of the mirror, it tells you the lies you need to believe.”

– Muriel Barbery

25. “Over the Tsushima Basin, they could hear the powerful clicks, like punches to the chest, of sperm whales hunting below, and nearing the island of Dogo, granite spires rose sudden from the sea, white up top from bird guano and orange below from great gatherings of starfish.”

– Adam Johnson

27. “His fate had taken him off two trains this morning, had raised him to the surface at Whitehall Street, had shown him the spinning atoms, unraveling, the end of life, all of them people tethered by love, and habit, and work, and meaning, tied into a meaning suddenly exploded, because contrary to all he had imagined, being tied, being known, did not keep you safe.”

– Claire Messud

28. “He knows your name and you know his, and you almost killed him and, because you got so close to doing so but didn’t, you want to fall on him, weeping, because you are so lonely, so lonely always, and all contact is contact, and all contact makes us so grateful we want to cry and dance and cry and cry.”

– Dave Eggers

29. “They were all scarecrows, blown about under the murdering sunball with empty ribcages.”

– Cynthia Ozick

30. “Everything was still bathed and saturated with her presence — higher, wider, deeper than life, a shift in optics that had produced a rainbow edge, and I remember thinking that this must be how people felt after visions of saints — not that my mother was a saint, only that her appearance had been as distinct and startling as a flame leaping up in a dark room.”

– Donna Tartt

31. “We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.”

– Michael Ondaatje

32. “As she picked up her shoes from the closet and tiptoed from the room, she felt, for a vertiginous moment, an unlawful excitement.”

– Paula Fox

33. “What I saw made me want to fell the highest spruce and watch it tip over and fall with a rush and a crash that echoed through the valley and trim it myself in record time and strip it clean myself without stopping even though that was the hardest thing to do and drag it to the river bank with my bare hands and my own back with neither horse nor man to help me and heave it into the water with the strength I suddenly knew I had, and the splash and the spray would rise as high as a house in Oslo.”

– Per Petterson

34. “He was sensitive to lives that had, beneath their surface, like a huge rock or shadow, a glory that would be discovered, that would rise one day to the light.”

– James Salter

35. “Each of her soothing utterances battered me more grievously than the last—as if I were traveling in a perverse ambulance whose function was to collect a healthy man and steadily damage him in readiness for the hospital at which a final and terrible injury would be inflicted.”

– Joseph O’Neill

36. “And maybe I tried with too much mettle — my lines might have mentioned the “Latin gusto” of her calves and hips in motion, and how the small blond hairs of her nape quelled my fear of becoming a “non crooning castrato” — because not four days after I posted the letter she arrived at the prison wearing an orange autumn dress, the strapless kind that could reverse a vasectomy.”

– William Giraldi

38. “It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.”

– Jeffrey Eugenides

39. “He’d say “I love you” to every man in the squad before rolling out, say it straight, with no joking or smart-ass lilt and no warbly Christian smarm in it either, just that brisk declaration like he was tightening the seat belts around everyone’s soul.”

– Ben Fountain

40. “I came to hate the complainers, with their dry and crumbly lipsticks and their wrinkled rage and their stupid, flaccid, old-people sun hats with brims the breadth of Saturn’s rings.”

– Karen Russell

41. “Maybe life doesn’t get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we’re willing to find: small wonders where they grow.”

– Barbara Kingsolver

42. “Around the beginning of this century, the Queen of Thailand was aboard a boat, floating along with her many courtiers, manservants, maids, feet-bathers, and food tasters, when suddenly the stern hit a wave and the queen was thrown overboard into the turquoise waters of the Nippon-Kai, where, despite her pleas for help, she drowned, for not one person on that boat went to her aid.”

– Zadie Smith

43. “Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this.”

– Jamaica Kincaid

44. “As my grandfather went, arm over arm, his heart making sour little shudders against his ribs, he kept listening for a sound, the sound of the tiger, the sound of anything but his own feet and lungs.”

– Tea Obreht

45. “Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”

– Iris Murdoch

46. “We all owe death a life.”

– Salman Rushdie

47. “In the deep gloom he could see the electric white gashes where the water boiled over the boulders.”

– Ron Carlson

48. “We are souls shut inside a cage of bones; souls squeezed into a parcel of flesh.”

– Michel Faber

49. “Profound was Gary’s relief the next morning as he bumped and glided, like a storm-battered yacht, into the safe harbor of his work week.”

– Jonathan Franzen

50. “Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings.”

– Margaret Atwood

51. “I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them.”

– Annie Dillard

52. “Coming out into the late night and walking round the building with the secretive grating roll of the stony path beneath his steps, the evening throbbed back through him as blood thumps slowly, reliving effort, after exertion.”

– Nadine Gordimer

53. “Sometimes, when she’s out here alone, she can feel the pulse of something bigger, as if all things animate were beating in unison, a glory and a connection that sweeps her out of herself, out of her consciousness, so that nothing has a name, not in Latin, not in English, not in any known language.”

– T.C. Boyle

55. “Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air.”

– Anthony Doerr

56. “Two weeks later, the tape arrived of the race and I memorized it, especially those last hundred yards, Wowie alone, heading for the finish line, his body rhythmically stretching and contracting as his four legs reached and folded, reached and folded.”

– Jane Smiley

57. “He had no right to be there, he had already been profoundly changed, he was no good at small talk, she was half naked, it was dawn and he loved her.”

– Mark Helprin

58. “At a certain point in her life, she realises it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child.”

– Lydia Davis (have you ever seen such a beautiful sentence that hinges on tense alone?)

59. “Some nights in the midst of this loneliness I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith alone.”

– Wendell Berry

60. “Home, we drank a little wine, put on some of that sticky saxophone music we used to keep around to drown out the bitter squeaks in our hearts.”

– Sam Lipsyte

61. “And so we stood together like that, at the top of that field for what seemed like ages, not saying anything, just holding each other, while the wind kept blowing and blowing at us, tugging our clothes, and for a moment, it seemed like we were holding onto each other because that was the only way to stop us from being swept away into the night.”

– Kazuo Ishiguro

62. “I want to sleep in her uterus with my foot hanging out.”

– Barry Hannah

63. “We laughed and laughed, together and separately, out loud and silently, we were determined to ignore whatever needed to be ignored, to build a new world from nothing if nothing in our world could be salvaged, it was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn’t think about my life at all.”

– Jonathan Safran Foer

64. “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

– Jack Kerouac

65. “Heaven opened and the water hammered down, reviving the reluctant old well, greenmossing the pigless pigsty, carpet bombing still, tea-colored puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-colored minds.”

– Arundhati Roy

66. “The torch spit sparks and sent chunks of flaming tar spinning into the air behind her as she bolted across the cosmos — the only body in the heavens who was not held to a strict elliptical path.”

– Elizabeth Gilbert

67. “Figures dark beneath their loads pass down the far bank of the river, rendered immortal by the streak of sunset upon their shoulders.”

– Peter Matthiessen

68. “But it goes from bad to worse, and the moment he sets foot in Black’s room, he feels everything go dark inside him, as though the night were pressing through his pores, sitting on top of him with a tremendous weight, and at the same time his head seems to be growing, filling with air as though about to detach itself from his body and float away.”

– Paul Auster

69. “They were sorry, they were saying with their bodies, they were accepting each other back, and that feeling, that feeling of being accepted back again and again, of someone’s affection for you always expanding to encompass whatever new flawed thing had just manifested in you, that was the deepest, dearest thing he’d ever—”

– George Saunders

70. “Decisions are never really made – at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all around assholery.”

– Thomas Pynchon

72. “The love I felt for her on that train ride had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many sullen moons — it was systemic and it was complete.”

– Gary Shteyngart

73. “The week after Halloween had a quality both hungover and ominous, the light pitched, the sky smashed against the rooftops.”

– Jonathan Lethem

74. “Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same.”

– Colum McCann

75. “For the first time in years, he felt the deep sadness of exile, knowing that he was alone here, an outsider, and too alert to the ironies, the niceties, the manners, and indeed, the morals to be able to participate.”

– Colm Toibin

76. “But these thoughts broke apart in his head and were replaced by strange fragments: This is my soul and the world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air.”

– Emily St. John Mandel (a finalist for beautiful sentences, more like poetry than prose)

77. “Life was neither something you defended by hiding nor surrendered calmly on other people’s terms, but something you lived bravely, out in the open, and that if you had to lose it, you should lose it on your own terms.”

– Edwidge Danticat

78. “There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.”

– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

79. “But in another city, another valley, another ghetto, another slum, another favela, another township, another intifada, another war, another birth, somebody is singing Redemption Song, as if the Singer wrote it for no other reason but for this sufferah to sing, shout, whisper, weep, bawl, and scream right here, right now.”

– Marlon James

80. “His toe scuffs a soft storm of sand, he kneels and his arms spread in pantomimic celebration, the immigrant, as in every moment of his life, arriving eternally on the shore of his Self.”

– E.L. Doctorow

81. “Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.”

– J.M. Coetzee

82. “The only cities were of ice, bergs with cores of beryl, blue gems within white gems, that some said gave off an odor of almonds.”

– Annie Proulx

83. He had no religious belief, but it was impossible not to think of an invisible presence or witness in the room, and that these words spoken aloud were like signatures on an unseen contract.”

– Ian McEwan

84. “And even if I recognized her strategy, her sneak attack, I was afraid that some unseen speck of truth would fly into my eye, blur what I was seeing and transform him from the divine man I thought he was into someone quite mundane, mortally wounded with tiresome habits and irritating imperfections.”

– Amy Tan

85. “Every person had a star, every star had a friend, and for every person carrying a star there was someone else who reflected it, and everyone carried this reflection like a secret confidante in the heart.”

– Orhan Pamuk

86. “Memory is a great deceiver, grief and longing cloud the past, and recollections, even vivid ones, fade.”

– Daniel Alarcon

87. “Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday’s unrecollected sins.”

– Hilary Mantel

89. “We need to develop a better descriptive vocabulary for lying, a taxonomy, a way to distinguish intentional lies from unintentional ones, and a way to distinguish the lies that the liar himself believes in – a way to signal those lies that could be more accurately described as dreams.”

– Rivka Galchen

90. “She understood as women often do more easily than men, that the declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.”

– Peter Carey

91. “The road ran away westwards in the mist of the early morning, running cunningly through the little hills and going to some trouble to visit tiny towns which were not, strictly speaking, on its way.”

– Flann O’Brien

92. “We had loving beautiful sex just as soon as we could get ourselves to stop talking — loving and beautiful in the expressionist, pathetic-fallacy sense in which you might say a meadow was loving and beautiful even if it was full of hamsters ready to kill each other on sight, but only when they’re awake.”

– Nell Zink

93. “And we know, until they stop their terrible motion, until they cease swooping and darting and banging into the walls, until they alight, come to rest, exhausted, spent, there is nothing at all we can do.”

– Nathan Englander

94. “He was still a handsome man, with a tanned, chiseled face and long, thick, wavy white hair, but his cells had begun to reproduce in a haphazard fashion, destroying the DNA of neighboring cells and secreting toxins into his body.”

– Michel Houellebecq

95. “You’re an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary otherwise; you have to examine such minerals in the absence of light to discover their beauty, you tell yourself.”

– Joyce Carol Oates

96. “In fact, this particular memory is one she’ll return to again and again, for the rest of her life, long after Rolph has shot himself in the head in their father’s house at twenty eight: her brother as a boy, hair slicked flat, eyes sparking, shyly learning to dance.”

– Jennifer Egan

97. “Twenty were jammed together on the stoop, tiers of heads made one central head, and the wings rested along the banisters, a raggedy monster of boys studying her approach.”

– Leonard Michaels

98. “It was plain as the stars that time herself moved in grand tidal sweeps rather than the tick-tocks we suffocate within, and that I must reshape myself to fully inhabit the earth rather than dawdle in the sump of my foibles.”

– Jim Harrison

99. “Sometimes I wonder if Junior remembers anything, or if his head is like a colander, and the memories of who bottle-fed him, who licked his tears, who mothered him, squeeze through the metal like water to run down the drain, and only leave the present day, his sand holes, his shirtless bird chest, Randall yelling at him: his present washed clean of memory like vegetables washed clean of the dirt they grow in.”

– Jesmyn Ward

100. “So, as was often the case when he was alone and sober, whatever the surroundings, he saw a boy pushing his entrails back in, holding them in his palms like a fortune-teller’s globe shattering with bad news; or he heard a boy with only the bottom half of his face intact, the lips calling mama.”

– Toni Morrison (it’s suitable to end with Toni Morrison; she could be the queen of beautiful sentences)

在学英语时，很多词语并不是虽然是由简单词汇组成，但是其实用起来非常装逼，往往令别人云里雾里，以下就讲一些跟French有关的词汇以及其背后的渊源，希望能帮助你更好的理解。

French

1. Pardon/excuse my French

英文释义：Excuse my inappropriate language. Usually used humorously, especially around children, as if to suggest that an inappropriate word was, in fact, a word from a different language.

中文释义：原谅我说话粗鲁

A coy phrase used when someone who has used a swear-word attempt to pass it off as French. The coyness comes from the fact both the speaker and listener are of course both well aware the swear-word is indeed English.

“Pardon/excuse my French”主要是用来表示由于愤怒生气抑不住要说难听的话，但又不得不控制自己的风度，因此在说脏话之前提醒对方一下或者说完之后道歉，以表示礼貌和优雅。那么问题来了？为什么在英语表达里面偏偏要用“French”来表达说话粗鲁呢？印象中法语不是既浪漫又动听，好像跟粗鲁扯不上边吧。

根据英国短语网站The Phrasefinder的解释：This usage is mid 20th century English in origin. A version of it is found in Michael Harrison's All Trees were Green, 1936:"A bloody sight better (pardon the French!) than most."

该俚语用法来源于19世纪英国，最先见于1936年的小说。。The source of the phrase is earlier and derives from a literal usage of the exclamation. In the 19th century, when English people used French expressions in conversation they often apologised for it - presumably because many of their listeners (then as now) wouldn't be familiar with the language. An example of this was given in The Lady's Magazine, 1830:Bless me, how fat you are grown! - absolutely as round as a ball: - you will soon be as enbon-point (excuse my French) as your poor dear father, the major.'En bon point' is French for 'plump; well-nourished'. It might seem odd to us now that the speaker, having been rather rude about her compatriot's appearance, felt obliged to apologise for doing so in French, but not for the rudeness itself.该词的早期用法是用于表示语气感叹的。在18世纪，英国人习惯在对话中夹杂一些法语，因为当时法语是上流社会的通用语言，普通人不懂法语，因此在每次要说法语之前，人们总会先说“excuse my French”，表示抱歉。如："天哪，你长得多胖呀-简直圆得像个球：-你马上就会变得跟你那可怜的爸爸一样肥（请原谅我的粗鲁）”。

'En bon point' 在法语中表示“肥胖，营养足”的意思。但是就今天的视角来看，说话人明明对其同伴的外表做出了粗鲁的评价，却不以为然，反而为其使用法语这行为而道歉，真是有意思。

当然还有另外一种说法，就是英法两国因为争夺欧洲大陆上的大佬之称而长期不合，尤其是12-13世纪期间的百年战争，这种不和同样表现在语言上的互黑，因此出现了法国人抵触英语，有关英国人的法语词汇以及有关法国人的英语词汇都偏离了其原本的字面意思，带有浓厚的感情色彩。俗话说的好，“Every country has neighbours they like to look down on. For the English it's the French” （任何国家都有个冤家邻国，正如英国和法国）， 邻国的存在就是拿来黑的。

例句：Excuse my French，who the fuck do you think you are....不好意思我要骂人了，你以为你是什么东西……

If you’ll pardon my French, he’s a bloody fool.对不起，我要说脏话了，他就是个傻蛋

2. French leave

英文释义：the custom (in the 18th century prevalent in France and sometimes imitated in England) of going away from a reception, etc. without taking leave of the host or hostess. Hence, jocularly, to take French leave is to go away, or do anything, without permission or notice.

中文释义：不告而别

法国人都喜欢不告而别？其实并不全是。但是在18世纪，法国人性格随便，性情浪漫，在参加宴会等一切社交聚会时，养成了不向主人告别就擅自离去的习惯。

说到这个，又不得不说英法两国之间的互黑了。

The British thought that sneaking away from a gathering without telling anyone you're going wasn't acceptable manners across the channel. Curiously, or perhaps typically, the French refer to the same practice as filer a` l'anglais (“take English leave”). Americans used to use the phrase without knowing its origin. It has been said that the French leave but never say good-bye, while Americans say good-bye but never leave.

守规矩的英国人看不惯这种聚会上招呼不打就偷偷溜走的行为，因此在英语里面称为“French leave”。然而，在法语里面，法国人用“ a` l'anglais（English leave）”来表示“不辞而别”，真是冤冤相报何时了呢。而对于美国人而言，用的时候根本就比较懵懂了，压根就不知道其中的恩怨。当然，浪漫的法国人喜欢不辞而别，而热情的美国人却是实实在在的别而不辞。

“French leave” is also military slang for deserting，indicating the act of leisurely absence from a military unit. A common claim is that the idiom originated when English soldiers thought that French soldiers were cowardly and had a tendency to leave the battlefield without orders.

此外，英语中的 “French leave” 还用来表示士兵的“擅离职守”。这又是英国人在英法战争中观察出的法国人懒散的一大特点：法国士兵经常无视组织和纪律，擅自离开战场。

As well, leaving a restaurant or a hotel without paying your bill is taking French leave.同时，该词组还可以用来表示去餐厅或酒店不付钱就开溜的行为。

例句：Many of the boys at the school took french leave to go to the football match.学校里很多孩子旷课去看足球比赛。

He stole away an Irishman's bride and took a French leave of me and his master. 他拐走了一位爱尔兰人的新娘，并且背着我和他的主人私自逃走了。

3. French letter

中文释义：避孕套 （少儿不宜 ）按照字面意思，“法国信件”怎么会表示避孕套呢，这儿恐怕又得说到英法之间的恩怨了。

此处有种说法：：In Britain, a condom is also known as a French letter, much like the colloquial German word for a condom, "Pariser". English seventeenth-century tourists, traveling through France on their pilgrimage to the center of the ancient culture that was Rome, came across the town of Condom in southwestern France. It is said that there they made contact with ingenious French shepherds who were making prophylactics from sheep gut. A trade then ensued, whereby the English gentry would eagerly await their letters from France - French Letters - with a fresh supply of condoms.

十七世纪，英国人流行游学旅行，也就是经过法国一直游遍欧洲，直到古典文化中心城市罗马。而在这次旅行中，游学者必须要经过法国西南部的condom小镇 （取自高卢语“condate-ó-magos”，意为“汇流之处”）。当地的牧羊人会用羊肠做成避孕用品，这样旅游者经过时候会买下来给英国的贵族享用，通常是用信封装从法国寄出去，这样，只要有来自法国的来信，一般里面是装着刚做好的安全套（少儿不宜 ）。

The French aristocracy then learned of these useful items from their English friends and called them "Capote Anglaise" - English Raincoats. Thus the condom came full circle, being made in France, being used in London, latterly in Paris, and finally being adopted by the Germans as a Pariser.

恰的是，英国贵族的这种避孕方法也让法国本国的贵族感到新奇，于是也纷纷效仿起来，这种本来就是法国国内的产品经过英国小伙伴推广，倒成了舶来品，被法国人成为“Capote Anglaise”，也就是“English Raincoats （英式雨衣）”，其实也就是安全套。所以说，安全套可是“产在法国，用在英国，火在巴黎，而后德国”。德国人也是实在，直接将它成为“Pariser（字面意思是“巴黎的玩意”）”，看样子，不止英法两国，任何邻国都要互相抹黑一把才算真爱。

Many French letters express the old image (or prejudice) that anything coming from France is decadent and has to do with sex.

说到这个，还可以接着说英国人怎么黑法国人的。英语中还有很多跟“French”有关的词语，大多都是跟法国人“堕落，纵欲，性感露骨”等典型的死板印象。

比如“French kiss”，法式亲吻，即舌吻，是一战期间法国士兵将这种接吻方式从战场上带回英国，加入英文。

这个还算比较浪漫的词汇了，而有些词组就明显的不怎么友好了。如：”French pox /diseases” 意为“花柳病“（根据史料记载，梅毒是由西班牙人在15世纪90年代末传播到了欧洲大陆）；“French novel” 指色情小说（少儿不宜 ）；French postcard指色情图片（少儿不宜 ）。

Ascribing "bad" habits and plagues to your nearest neighbours has always been common in Europe; during the 1917-1920 influenza pandemic the disease was called Spanish Flu in southern France, German Fever in Belgium, Greek Flu in Turkey and Arabian Flu in Greece.有意思的是，欧洲各国都喜欢把一些不良形象安在邻国身上，真真甩锅高手。比如在1917-1920年，欧洲爆发大流感，源头谁也不说不清，有说是来自美国堪萨斯州的军营，又说来自源于因为中国支援欧战的劳工带来。但是因为西班牙感染人数比较多，连国王都难逃此病，所以法国南部称这次流感为西班牙型流行性感冒，比利时人称之为德国型流；土耳其人称之为希腊式流感，而希腊人称之为阿拉伯型流行性感冒。邻国变成了名副其实的”邻锅”。

例句：Dont say french letter unlike in other nations of the world, it simply means a condom in France.

不像在世界其他国家，在法国不要说French Letter（法国的信）这个词，在法语中这个词就是避孕套的意思。

4. French window 英语释义：1. A pair or one of a pair of windows extending to the floor and opening in the middle.2. A casement window.中文释义：落地窗

例句：hook the frenchwindow when you come in.你进来的时候把落地窗关好。

5. French Fries 薯条这个词组是十分耳熟能详的，但是小C想说的是，为什么薯条里面会有法国两个字呢？​据说是因为在第一次世界大战的时候，美国士兵在比利时吃到了这种薯条，觉得特别美味，而当时在比利时军队中的通用语言是法语，他们就以为是“法国的薯条”了。而此处有一个轶事，在攻打伊拉克期间，由于法国的不支持，美国共和党议员曾将众议院自助餐厅菜单上的“French fries”(炸薯条)改为“Freedom fries”（“自由”薯条），故意除去“French”（法国）一字，以表达对法国对伊政策的不满。据说，众院行政委员会主席奈伊除了下令将众院三座办公楼所有餐厅菜单上的“French fries”改为“Freedom fries”之外，也将，“French toast”（法式烘烤面包）改为“Freedom toast”（“自由”烘烤面包）。

例句：I have chicken and French fries for lunch.我午餐吃了鸡肉和炸蕃薯条。

（整理于百度百科、欧洲时报、the free dictionary、the prasefinder 、Idioms online）

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