France

The orchestra's horn is French only in English.

English distinguished the French style of hunting horn from the German. The instrument's makers were largely German, and players often just call it the horn.

A whole family of English words for fittings points at France.

French window, French door and French polish all use the country as a mark of a particular style rather than of manufacture there.

The French say the same thing about the English: filer à l'anglaise.

Eighteenth-century English writers used it for the supposedly French habit of leaving a party without taking leave of the host, and the army later applied it to absence without leave. French returned the compliment with an identical phrase pointing the other way across the Channel.

A French finish made from a resin secreted by an insect farmed in India.

The rubbed shellac technique spread through European cabinet workshops in the early nineteenth century, and English speakers credited French practice when they named it. The shellac itself comes from the lac insect, harvested mainly in India and Thailand.

English pins anything sexual on France; French does the same to England.

English slang has attached the word French to sexual practices, devices, and diseases for centuries, with no evidence that any of them started there. French speakers made the same move in reverse, calling the condom a capote anglaise, the English hood.

The French return the insult precisely: they call it leaving English style.

Eighteenth-century English writers attached the habit to French manners, while the French phrase filer à l'anglaise does exactly the same thing in reverse. Several other European languages borrowed one version or the other, so the rudeness always belongs to the neighbors.

Its discoverer first wanted to call it catium, and was told it would sound like cat in English.

Marguerite Perey identified element 87 at the Curie Institute in Paris in 1939, in the decay of actinium-227. She proposed catium for its strongly electropositive character, then named it for her country instead. IUPAC adopted francium in 1949. Perey later became the first woman elected to the French Academy of Sciences.

For most of its life in English the phrase had nothing to do with the baguette.

Early modern English cookery used French bread for any light, white, well-risen wheaten loaf made in the French manner, in contrast to heavy English household bread. The long thin loaf the phrase now names is a twentieth-century Paris form, and the word baguette is not recorded for bread until the 1920s. A 1993 French decree still fixes what a traditional baguette may contain.

Americans call it a door and the British call the same thing a window.

The form came from seventeenth-century France, where casement windows were extended to the floor so that rooms could open directly onto gardens and terraces. British English still calls it a French window; American English settled on French door. The phrase has since been borrowed again for a style of refrigerator with two hinged upper doors.