“
French picked up and integrated as many as two thousand Italian words, such as arcade, balcon (balcony), concert, cavalerie (cavalry), infanterie (infantry) and bizarre. The result was a cornucopia of terms from regional and foreign languages. For modern readers, the most surprising aspect of sixteenth-century French is its casualness. Most French speakers today, especially the purists, assume that French was born clear and uniform, but until the seventeenth century the language had none of the orderly precision for which it would be famous in centuries to come. During the baroque period, French was indeed baroque. Writers of François I’s era treated French like a buffet dinner, helping themselves to words from regional dialects and foreign languages, creating new words as it suited them, using verbs as nouns and basically serving up the language any way they pleased. This large-scale creativity and inventiveness gave writers a verve and a vigour that would never be matched once the cult of bon usage (correct usage) took hold in the next century.
”
”