Wordwatch: Homage
“The trampy excesses of the modern drag wardrobe, the cartoonish, almost spiteful exaggeration of female features… doesn’t feel like an homage anymore but a misogynistic send-up..” – Spectator,13 August 2022
This writer obviously thinks of the word “homage” as French, the initial “h” silent. I’m always puzzled by this need to see a perfectly ordinary English word Frenchified in this way. Yes, “homage” is French in origin, but it was naturalised in this country five hundred years ago. H.W.Fowler, compiling his guide to Modern English Usage at the beginning of the last century, didn’t see any need to single it out for special mention. Oddly, though, it was never naturalised in the United States as it has been here. Across the Atlantic it has retained its French pronunciation to rhyme with “mirage”, and the French stress on the last syllable. It’s also commonly awarded a double “m”, which has always been an alternative but less usual spelling.
It came over from France in the Middle Ages, in the context of feudal law, where it signified “the formal and public acknowledgement of duty or obedience”, often accompanied by an auxiliary verb such as “to pay” or “to render”. But from the Renaissance onwards it had established itself as a fully-integrated English word with English pronunciation including the aspirate “h”. The rhythm of a line from Robert Burns gives the pronunciation: “The parent-pair their secret homage pay”…
Now, as is the familiar way with our relationship to American words, “hommage”, with stress on the final syllable, “m” doubled and the “h” silent, has hopped back across the Atlantic and is now frequently employed here as though “homage” had never been an English word in its own right.
It’s one thing to adopt an American term, which may well be useful and have the added merit of being terse and expressive. It’s quite another to allow an Americanism that has no advantages over our own long-established word to usurp what is really exactly the same word and adorn it gratuitously with what comes across as pretentious “foreignisation”. People who say “hommage” with (the American equivalent of) a French accent only tell us they are ignorant of standard English. But then, there’s a certain glamour in things American anyway, isn’t there? Perhaps those who use the word only intend to tell us they’re smart and up-to-date. What they make very plain is that they aren’t as familiar with basic English as they fancy they are.