France, where people are more tolerant of obscenity.”

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The phrase has found large use in broadcast television and family films where less offensive words are followed by “pardon my French” to emphasize their meaning without violating censorship or rating guidelines. A good example is in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Cameron calls Mr. Rooney and says, “Pardon my French, but you’re an asshole.” In another segment, Bueller says about Cameron “Excuse my French, but if we were to stick a lump of coal up Cameron’s ***, we would have a diamond in two weeks.”

The phrase has found large use in broadcast television and family films where less offensive words are followed by “pardon my French” to emphasize their meaning without violating censorship or rating guidelines. A good example is in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Cameron calls Mr. Rooney and says, “Pardon my French, but you’re an asshole.” In another segment, Bueller says about Cameron “Excuse my French, but if we were to stick a lump of coal up Cameron’s ***, we would have a diamond in two weeks.”

It has been suggested that the French language is used because of the association of the French people with vulgarity, and that this euphemism is an example of Francophobia.

An innocuous theory is that when the English were looking around for a foreign language to put into the phrase “pardon my …”, the closest one and obvious choice was neighbouring French. Additionally, French was for a long time the most-spoken foreign language in the United Kingdom.

Some believe the expression may have come from 1950s intellectuals who were well-versed in French. In the fifties, cursing was considered to be a major taboo, so the speaker would actually curse in French to be more polite. In these instances, “Pardon my French” would refer to actual French.

Related expressions

Several expressions in French attempt to link various practices perceived as unsavory to England, e.g., “l’éducation anglaise” (disciplining children by sexually-tinged spanking). Ironically, several expressions are used by both the English and the French to describe the same unacceptable habit, but attributing the habit to the other people : e.g., “taking French leave” (leaving a party or other gathering without taking polite leave of one’s host) is referred to in French as “filer à l’anglaise” (literally, “leaving English-style”), while the (now somewhat archaic) expression “French letter” (referring to a condom) is rendered in French as “capote anglaise”. During the 16th century in England, genital herpes was called the “French disease”