When you start learning French you are always warned about “faux amis”, false friends. Words that look as if they have an obvious meaning but which mean something quite different. So “assister” means to attend, not to help. A teaching colleague of mine, an elderly and unworldly spinster, was unaware that the word “préservatif” was a false friend. Her 6th form students knew that it was French for “condom”, so they enjoyed the lesson in which the word featured and their teacher proceeded to try and explain why the couple in the story they were translating might be in need of jam.

The interesting thing is that a false friend can change the meaning of a phrase. “Ancien” in French means “previous” not “ancient” but this has not prevented the term ”ancien régime”, the political system toppled by the French Revolution, from being wrongly associated in many minds with the words “ancient” or “archaic”. In fact the term was first used in 1790 by the Comte de Mirabeau in a letter to the King. He was simply referring to the previous regime.

So what? Well it can lead to misunderstanding. It is generally believed that the French Revolution came about because the political system was old, out of date and crumbling. This has been partly encouraged by the false friend “ancien régime”. In actual fact it can be argued, as indeed it is in Simon Sharma’s brilliant book Citizens, that the regime collapsed because of the bungled way in which it was trying to modernise in the 1780s.

A similar process seems to operate in the case of the English phrase “the Dark Ages”. The phrase was coined to describe the era in which only limited written evidence has come down to us. The age is dark because little light is shed on it. However, the word “dark” operates as a false friend because it can be associated with words such as sinister, dangerous, savage, uncivilised. And this hides the fact that the limited evidence we have from medieval times points to the existence of poetry, refinement and craftsmanship.

We are well aware of the dangers of false news. We should also recognise that false news is sometimes brought by false friends.