More words that are often confused.

Coiffure/ coiffeur

Sometimes English words with foreign origins can be a special challenge to Thai writers. Those who are not familiar with the words may feel as if it is not enough to just understand English, but other languages as well. This problem is faced with the noun coiffure, which has entered the English language to describe a hairstyle, or the way hair is formally arranged. This word derives from a French term meaning to arrange hair. This word is often confused, even by native speakers of English, with the noun coiffeur, meaning a hairdresser or someone who arranges hair. Since both coiffure and coiffeur have the same origins in French, deciding which one to use can be difficult. It may be helpful to think of as many examples as possible of English words ending with the letters eur. Many of them, although not all, do start with a verb, and turn the verb into a person who does the action of the verb:

entrepreneur

connoisseur

provocateur

arbitrageur

litterateur

chauffeur

raconteur

restauranteur

grandeur

saboteur

seigneur

amateur

masseur

auteur

poseur

All of these are considered fairly refined and literary words in English, but might be seen in theses or academic articles about history or literature. Students and ajarns who specialize in business are familiar with such terms as entrepreneur and arbitrageur. The second term,  less common than the first, describes an investor who profits from the differences in price when the same, or extremely similar, security, currency, or commodity is traded on two or more markets. An amateur is someone who is not a professional, but does something for the love of it. A poseur strikes artificial poses to try to be something he is not. A chauffeur drives a car. A saboteur is guilty of sabotage. A litterateur, also written as litterateur, cares deeply about literature. A restauranteur owns or manages a restaurant. A raconteur is a skilled story-teller who recounts things in an entertaining way. A provocateur enjoys provoking people. This is usually seen as a bad thing, and an agent provocateur, another term that has entered the English language from the French, means someone who encourages others to break the law so that they can be caught. Despite these negative connotations, a British company manufacturing lingerie chose to be called Agent Provocateur, probably just to sound provocative without referring to the legal aspects of the term. A masseur is professionally trained to give massages. One mistake that commonly occurs even with native English speakers is that the term masseuse, a French word meaning a woman professionally trained to give massages, is used for male and female masseurs. This mistake is due to confusion with original meanings in the French language. A simple way to avoid such potential errors is to use the term massage therapist instead. With all of these words, we have seen that the ending eur should make us think about a person, and so coiffeur is the one who does the hairstyle and not the hairstyle itself. As a further reminder, we may consider inventing a sentence to unite these terms with something in common for added clarity:

The coiffeur was a raconteur, but not an amateur, as his prices were high.

The coiffeur was a connoisseur of historic hairstyles, but was also a poseur.

As for the word ending ure, it is also popular in English, meaning an act, process, or result. A coiffure is the result of hair being arranged by a coiffeur. The writer of Thai English may wonder if it is really worth bothering to remember the fine points that separate coiffeur and coiffure, when there is a perfectly good English word, hairstyle, that may be used instead of coiffure. It is always a good approach when writing English to choose the simplest and plainest of any alternatives, especially when selecting words the writer is confident about. Even so, there may be cases in academic research where it is necessary to refer to more difficult words, at which point they are unavoidable, and getting them right becomes essential. If the word hairstyle has already appeared a number of times in a thesis or academic research article, it may seem appropriate to use a different term, just to vary things a little and avoid repetition. The natural alternative in this case would be the synonym coiffure. Here are some further usage examples:

• Pudding-bowl bobs and army-type cuts were for decades the only hairstyles allowed to be sported by Thai schoolchildren — but now looser rules spell new freedom for classroom coiffures.
• Russell Crowe’s hair in the movie ‘State of Play’ isn’t the only shocker in a crop of really dreadful film coiffures.
• Shimada is also said to be the birthplace of the Shimada topknot, a type of traditional Japanese coiffure. An annual festival held in September features a procession of women dressed in kimonos with their hair done in a Shimada topknot.
• The exciting Hairworld World Cup may be over, but the Organisation Mondiale Coiffure (OMC) will continue to hold regional championships, with the OMC Asia Cup Open coming to Malaysia next year.
• The Japan Hair Museum (Japanese Coiffure Museum), located on Yamato Oji-dori, tells the history of Japanese coiffure.
• Short back and sides, a beard trim and a thorough ear cleaning: there is little Hanoi’s streetside barbers won’t do. In the city where increasing numbers of Western salons cater to dapper urbanites with cash to spend, the city’s old-school sidewalk coiffeurs still do a brisk trade thanks to loyal customers and $1.30 haircuts.
• Couture coiffeur Orlando Pita created these sculptural silhouettes for Christian Dior.
• Dante Alighieri Di Pagliani, who has been a coiffeur since his teens and whose clients have included Audrey Hepburn, Maria Callas, Margot Fonteyn, the Duchess of Windsor, Princess Margaret of England and Princess Grace of Monaco, has designed and will execute the hair styling, as well as the hats, for the production.
• In 1888, Alexandre-Ferdinand Godefroy, a French coiffeur inventeur — that’s hairstylist inventor — patented the hair dryer’s earliest ancestor.
• Paddy Breathnach’s ”Blow Dry” has the curious distinction of being the third more-or-less-British hair-care comedy to be released in this country in the last year or so, following Barry Levinson’s ”Everlasting Piece,” about a pair of Belfast toupee salesmen, and ”The Big Tease,” last winter’s sham documentary about an indomitable Scottish coiffeur triumphing in the cutthroat hair-cutting world of Los Angeles.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)