I'd say, French was consisdered the language of cluture for many years in England. Royality and anyone who wanted to claim some sort of "upper class" status *simply must speak french, darling". ;-)

So, you peppered your world with all things french (or french sounding) including "cherie" and "RSVP".


Another one I'm curious about is "mayday" which supposedly comes from french but I can't quite figure out how. M'aidez or M'aider - but neither of those would be something a french person would scream when his plane is going down.

and guesses?

www.languagehat.com/archives/001481.php

For some three centuries after the Conquest all the literate classes used French, both spoken and written, very often alongside their native English: a Romance language overlaid the original Germanic one. Written French was especially important in medieval England as being a principal language of record - alongside British Latin - so that the sheer volume of surviving documentary evidence in Anglo-French for this period is overwhelmingly greater than that left behind in English, especially up to the late fourteenth century. No less important than the quantity of Anglo-French is the the breadth of its use. Although scholarly attention has focused largely on its literary productions from the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the later non-literary works are arguably of geater importance for the development of English culture as a whole. The law, from Parliament down to the lower courts, the administration of government at national and local level, the commercial and financial framework of the country, all worked through French rather than English. What is more, French was used extensively for all the arts and sciences long before English. This penetration of French into the whole fabric of civilization in medieval England means that the study of English etymology cannot safely confine itself to tracing words back to a cut-off point in Middle English, or even to making a leap across the Channel in search of a 'borrowing' from medieval French in order to reach the origin of English terms. The Middle English Dictionary reveals on virtually every page the massive and very obvious debt owed by English to French: less obviously, however, it also reveals that this debt was not built up by 'borrowing' in the conventional sense and that in literally thousands of cases forms and meanings were adopted (not 'borrowed') into English from insular, as opposed to continental French. The relationship of Anglo-French with Middle English was one of merger, not of borrowing, as a direct result of the bilingualism of the literate classes in medieval England.

The proper spelling is, "Repondez, S'il Vous Plait." With accent marks that I don't know how to make.

In the Romance languages as well as in English, "Please" is a sort of shorthand for, "If it pleases you."