favoris

A fallout from my 10/17 posting “An underwater Psychiatrist cartoon” (“all about the noun favorite: an implicit superlative, denoting a top-ranking element in some comparison set”), this e-mail from my old friend Benita Bendon Campbell this morning:

the word favoris in French, as you probably know, means ‘sideburns’ and I can’t imagine why

Bonnie, who’s had a long career as a teacher of French, tends to assume that my command of that language is vastly greater than it actually is — a kindly person would say that my knowledge of French is spotty — but in this case, yes, I had a dim recollection of this odd fact, mostly because favoris ‘sideburns’ got borrowed into (British) English, where it enjoyed a brief fashion in the 19th century. Summarized from OED (1972) under the noun favourite, with a colorful cite from Benjamin Disraeli (the British novelist and Prime Minister):

noun favori ‘sideburn’ (usually in plural); 3 19th-century British examples (Disraeli from 1831: His beard, his mustachios, his whiskers, his favoris.) Etymology: a borrowing from French.

So it’s into French that we must go.

From the Word Histories site (written by Pascal Tréguer, a Frenchman with a long career teaching French as a second language, “now living in Lancashire and devoting my time to uncovering the stories behind words and phrases”) on “The history of ‘burnsides’, ‘sideburns’ and ‘sideboards'”, from 3/29/18:

Image may be NSFW.
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Marc Chagall, L’Homme aux Favoris (Man with sideburns), lithograph from 1922-23

Among the French equivalents of sideburns are:

– favoris (literally ‘favourites’), a masculine word first recorded in Annette et le Criminel, ou suite du Vicaire des Ardennes (Paris, 1824), by the French novelist Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850).

In this sense, favoris used to be followed by en pattes de lapin, ‘in (the shape of a) rabbit’s legs’; hence the usual French word for sideburns, the feminine pattes.

The word favoris was also sometimes followed by en côtelettes, in (the shape of) cutlets.

Solid gold. What Balzac recorded was no doubt a slangy usage of this time, with favoris ‘favo(u)rites’ used to refer to sideburns because they were fashionable with — were favorites of, were favored by — some group of Frenchmen of the time.