When French people swear, do they say pardon my english??
No.”Pardon my French” is an exclusively English expression, and the French do not say “Pardonnez mon anglais” when they are swearing or using rude words. If they wanted to aplogise for using a certain term they would say “Excusez mon vocabulaire”. Traditionally the English and the French despised one another and because the French are often stereotypically associated with indecency, especially of a sexual nature, the English use the expression to cover crude or bad words pretending that they are French words. This antagonism goes back further than the Black Death (1348) and the expression harks back to the time of the Norman conquest in 1066, when the ordinary English spoke Anglo-Saxon, whilst the invaders, and particularly the nobles, spoke French. Using French words was then held in contempt by the natives since the Normans were the oppressors. There also may have been a grain of truth in the expression, in the sense that, later in history, courtiers and the higher ranks of British s
