Agrément

We recently had the outside of our house treated with a protective spray-on coating. The salesman who persuaded us to allow his company to carry out the work pointed out to us that we could set our minds at rest about the quality of the product, because it was approved by the British Board of Agrément.

British Board of what? The salesman pronounced it ˈægrəmənt.

The Board's website explains:

This word was not to be found in any of the dictionaries I had to hand at the time. Consulting the on-line OED, however, I find that the word is indeed recorded, but not in this meaning.

The OED gives three meanings. The first is as an alternative to agreement sense 9 (‘pl. Agreeable qualities, circumstances, or accessories. Now treated as Fr., les agréments’). The second is musical (‘pl. Grace-notes, embellishments’), the third diplomatic (‘The approval given by the government of a country to a diplomatic representative of another country’). But there is no mention of the BBA's commercial sense.

You read it here first.

An Italian Wine

English people are so confused and ignorant about foreign languages and how to pronounce them that I sometimes despair about (a) trying to document the state of the language and (b) giving helpful guidance to EFL learners who want to know how to pronounce foreign words and phrases in English.

I heard someone on the radio saying what a good wine pinot grigio was. But she called it ˌpiːnəʊ ˈgriːgiəʊ.

Oh dear, oh dear. Pinot is French, and apparently means ‘pinecone’, being used of this variety of grape perhaps because of the appearance of the small clusters in which it grows. It is pronounced pino, which as you would expect becomes English ˈpiːnəʊ. So far so good. In French the full name of the grape in question is pinot gris (‘grey pinecone’).