AskOxford: Go with the faux

With the return this autumn of faux (synthetic) fur as a must-have fashion item, this month we're featuring a word that's developing some interesting and entertaining new coinages.

A French word that simply means 'false', faux has a long record of use in English as a straightforward adjective with the same meaning as it has in French: Charlotte Bronté's Jane Eyre (1847) contains the line 'You have a 'faux air' of the Nebuchadnezzar in the fields about you'. It also appears in English in faux pas (an embarrassing blunder in a social situation), a word which we borrowed from French as far back as the 17th century.

In the twentieth century faux cropped up increasingly in the worlds of fashion and interior design, especially in North America; as well as faux fur, there's faux leather, faux marble, and even faux stainless-steel plastic laminate. As a French word, in these contexts faux sounds (or is intended to sound) classier and more sophisticated to our English ears than 'fake', 'synthetic' or 'artificial', although that's what it means.

More recently, faux has begun to appear in other contexts (faux-documentary, faux-macho banter) and with less positive connotations. Here, the speaker using it to register slight disdain for the word that faux is describing. In effect, there are currently two shades of meaning for faux in English usage: one that 'bigs up' a synthetic fabric or material and one that holds all the negative connotations that 'fake' or 'false' do.

Twenty-first century usage reveals a further development: faux is being joined to other words to form compound words in which faux- (sometimes spelled fo-) replaces a first syllable that rhymes with the /oh/ sound. One of the most widespread of these coinages is fauxhawk (also spelled fohawk). A fauxhawk is an adaptation of the Mohawk (usually known in British English as the Mohican) hairstyle especially beloved of punk rockers in the 1970s. With the Mohawk, you have to shave all your hair off apart from a central strip, which is then dyed in a garish colour. For those too timid to adopt this style, the fauxhawk provides an easy alternative: keep your hair and just gel up a strip or tuft in the middle, enabling the fashion-conscious to look cool at weekends and more conservative during working hours. Also known in the UK as the Hoxton fin (Hoxton being a fashion-forward area of London where arty types hang out), the 'do has graced the heads of soccer star David Beckham and Jack Osbourne (son of Ozzy) to name but a few.

fauxmosexual [combination of faux and homosexual]: a straight man who, like the more well-known metrosexual, is interested in fashion and personal grooming (activities typically associated with women or gay men), and who also adopts camp mannerisms. Some say that the fauxmosexual behaves in this way merely to attract women, hence the derogatory connotations of the faux- element of the word.
fauxtatoes: the Atkins^TM dieter's alternative to carb-laden spuds, fauxtatoes are actually mashed or purèed cauliflower.
fauxlex: a fake Rolex^TM watch.
fauxhemian: used as a noun or as an adjective, this word describes those people who adopt aspects of the appearance and trappings of the Bohemian lifestyle without actually straying too far from the straight and narrow of social conventions.