L'Chateau

[TheImpOfThePerverse2026]

Please can someone confirm this is wrong! There's a wedding company with this name in my town and I'm getting really angry about it 🤬

Yes, this seems ro be the norm. After all, anybody with a pair of scissors and a bottle of shampoo can potentially make your hair look different, but only a very small proportion can do it to a high professional standard... so their name is their reputation whereby you know it's them and their trusted, skilled colleagues doing it!

Sounds more like a Tellytubby than a chic French expression... but even the Tellytubby doesn't spell her name like that!!

Same here. A really good men's hairdresser has a very old looking 'Surname & Son' sign and the surname is one that could be a woman's name. DP happened to go in when passing and got a cut to suit his thick wavy hair.
Locals knew it was a good one but we were new to the area.

I see your L'Chateau and raise you an SS Great Britian.

And what's with the lower case ss in that sign?

'Je le veux' would be a better name.

Or 'placet' for those who are familiar with the classics 😀

One that sets my teeth on edge is 'chez the Smiths'. 'Chez Smith', at the Smith house, is correct.

I saw this today. I have a new hero.

When I lived in France years ago, there was a sportswear shop in town called 'Athlete's Foot'.

We have (or maybe had, not sure if it’s still open) a local nail and spray tan place called Q-Ticlez and Tan’z. I think I spelled that ”right”.

It was in the UK too.

As a French speaker I can with all certainty tell you it’s wrong.

I've just remembered another one. A local beauty therapist named her business 'Le Petite Spa'.

Every time I drove past that sign I wanted to jump out of my car and smash it to smithereens, just to knock that extra 'e' off.

At least the owner got 'le spa' right.

I dated someone who described himself as petite. Instant ick.

I can’t describe how much that is hurting my brain.

Woah 🤢

L' is with a vowel (including h)

How about ‘Hair Today…’ or ‘Fringe Benefits’? 😁 if Hair Gem’s is owned by Gemma, it could be quite a clever play, as apparently hair gems are a thing - sparkly stick-in hair decorations!

A lot of people love the idea of French automatically suggesting chic and stylish - but don't have the faintest idea of how it works; nor indeed apparently the ability to spend 10 seconds on the Internet.

For proof of this, you only need to look at the number of people who have named their DDs Beau.

Poor girls. You can imagine them in their first french lesson at school!

Technically, it should be written Le Château, OP. But maybe you knew that and your autocorrect took the accent off, like it just did for me?

That's the whole point of op's post. She spotted a mistake and it's making her cross!

Why, in French, is cock 'la queue', while vagina is 'le vagin'?

It's not always straightforward to do accents on phones.

Why is the German word for 'girl' neuter and not feminine? Why is a skirt masculine but a tie is feminine?

I think, in languages that have gendered articles for all nouns, native speakers probably don't even stop and make the connection between a male or female person having either masculine or feminine grammatical terms used for them, and an inanimate object being treated the same.

It's only native English speakers (and maybe other languages?) - where women are she, men are he and everything else is it - where it even crosses our mind when we encounter combinations in other languages that look odd to us.

I believe, and someone will correct me if I'm wrong, that all diminutive words (like mädchen) are neuter in German. So words with the -chen or -lein suffix

Works the other way round too - the French using questionable English. I went to an event when my ILs lived in France and the local mayor's very glamorous wife was there, wearing a sweatshirt featuring a picture of a Scotty dog and the slogan 'Favourite Dog'!

Yes, that's the explanation... but it just goes to prove that it's all about grammar rather than any assumption that the gender of a noun must 'make sense' in terms of a person's actual sex.