Michel Villoz sent me a French speaker's thoughts on the site.

Hello Dan,

Reading your page, I was pleased to see that many of your PAW are ordinary French words. So to be a pompous ass (cul pompeux in French), you just insert in your conversation a few French words that nobody knows the signification and you'll give the illusion of being an educated person.

In my country (French part of Switzerland), we get polluted by English words everywhere: big ads in English (specially from telephone companies), sale written on show-windows (sale means dirty in French) and there is a special word in French for clearance sales (soldes). And pompous people often add English words in their conversation to be "in", c'est-à-dire "à la page".

50 or 100 years ago, in French to give the illusion of a "good education", you had to insert Latin expression in your conversation, now, to be "modern", its English.

So its a pleasure to see that the pompousass use the same technique on both sides of the ocean.

In your list, I did recognize:
amygdala (Latin), amygdale in French, little gland that you get cut when you suffer too often of sorethroat.
desideratum (Latin), we use desiderata, a bit pompous in French too.
anodyne, anodin in French, thing of little importance
manqué, French from manquer (to miss), common
rictus, French, common
fait accompli, French, common
rodomontade, old French, rare, a bit pompous
tendentious, in French tendencieux, common
risible, French from rire (to laugh), common

Best regards,

Michel

I was shocked to hear French speakers sometimes resent the Anglicization of their language.

Michel's list includes two different types of words: Foreign words and loan words. Here's one example of how a usage guide treats them differently (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Foreign_terms):

Wikipedia prefers italics for phrases in other languages and for isolated foreign words that do not yet have common use in the English language. Use anglicized spellings for such words, or use the native spellings if they use the Latin alphabet (with or without diacritics). For example: "Reading and writing in Japanese requires familiarity with hiragana, katakana, kanji, and sometimes romaji."

Loan words or phrases that have common use in English, however—praetor, Gestapo, samurai, esprit de corps—do not require italicization. If looking for a good rule of thumb, do not italicize words that appear in an English language dictionary.

Note that kanji is italicized and samuri isn't - both are Japanese but only one is common enough to be considered loaned (I'd argue the same for the Yiddish words tsuris and mensch).