Warwick

When Curiosity touched down in Mars's Gale Crater in August last year, the French press was seized by a little bout of vocabulary panic. Describing a Mars "landing" is not as simple as you might think in French. The problem is that the usual word – atterrissage – is based on terre ‘earth’, and of course if you land on Mars you aren't landing on "Earth" at all.

Some papers used various circumlocutions to avoid the word altogether, but a few (and the majority of news blogs) ran with a pleasing coinage: amarsissage. It's nice, isn't it, to see a language with a specific word for "Mars landing"?

Of course the Académie Française, taking their usual struthious approach to language change, do not approve of it and advise instead that you say atterrissage sur Mars. BO-RING.

This is one of the few very dictionaries in French to find space for words like amarsissage, dedicated as it is to so-called "non-existant" items of vocabulary (a problematic title that I will return to). It is not a big book, and the style is jokey rather than academic, but at least it's a start.

The entries are a mix of anglicisms (follower, factchecker, open space), internet neologisms (meuporg ‘MMORPG’, plussoyer ‘to "+1" a post you like’), and fairly innocuous-looking French formations that for one reason or another have not met with official recognition (court-termisme, dédiabolisation).

I already knew amarsissage but there were a lot of other things I learned here for the first time. I particularly love the word kikoolol, which denotes the sort of person who writes online messages like this:

hey :) gd 2 meet u lol got any moar pix lololll :) :D

It's a compound word from lol, of course, and kikoo, an irritating text-speak way of spelling coucou ‘hi’. I think we've all come across a lot of kikoolols – do we have a word for them in English? Not that I can think of.

Some of the words in here began as widespread mistakes, and I'm pleased to see them get some treatment. For example there's an entry for the contentious term au jour d'aujourd'hui, meaning roughly "today", which is that rare thing in languages, a triple-pleonasm. (Hui already meant ‘today’, but it sounded confusingly similar to oui and so people started specifying by saying aujourd'hui; now that that has become a set item, it's gone one step further into au jour d'aujourd'hui.) There are people who are violently opposed to this term, but as always with synonyms it has taken on slightly different connotations from the original, so that it doesn't really mean ‘today’ – the usual sense is more like ‘nowadays’, ‘in this day and age’.

The editors introduce their definition of au jour d'aujourd'hui by saying, "This is undoubtedly one of the most-used words of the contemporary language, even though it does not exist at all." Well this is a very strange interpretation of the word exist. Clearly it exists – you can hear it all over the place. What they mean is that it's not in Larousse (although even the Académie has said this one is OK "if not abused"). It's a bit annoying that a dictionary that gives space to all these words sabotages its own project by pretending in the title that they don't really exist – that they're somehow not real words. They are real words. How many times do linguists have to say it?

The funny thing is, the Académie pretends that it's trying to promote the French language against the menacing spread of global English, but they only make French seem more hidebound and old-fashioned. Perhaps if they celebrated the vibrancy and inventiveness of actual spoken French, as glimpsed in books like this, they would not have to be so defensive all the time. Talk about court-termisme....

There are a few notable absences – I was sad to see no entry for my current favourite French word, frigotartinable ‘spreadable straight from the fridge’. But for anyone who wants to keep across contemporary French websites and literature, this is a useful and entertaining collection.