Being Mr. Kenny

We all know (or at least I hope we do) that RSVP stands for Répondez s’il vous plaît — meaning “Please respond” in French.

But did you know that it’s generally only English-speaking people that use this French phrase? Modern day French-speakers use “prière de répondre”.

I was just thinking about how you would tell a French person what “prière de répondre” would be in English. You couldn’t tell them to put “Please respond” on the bottom of an invitation because that would sound too formal, so obviously you would tell them to write RSVP, and when they asked what that stood for you’d tell them “Répondez s’il vous plaît”.

It’s quite possible that “prière de répondre” is the only French phrase whose English translation is actually another French phrase!

Thanks be to Wikipedia for providing some of the information for this post.