Friday, October 10, 2008

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything

A student asked about the use of 'sans', meaning 'without', in English. Perhaps the origin of this usage is in Shakespeare's As You Like It. Follow the link for the extract where Shakespeare coined this phrase. If you Google 'Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste' you'll find a lot of examples where this is used. Here's a recent one from this month's 'Telegraph'.
The word 'sans' outside this expression isn't common in English, and you don't need to use it except in technical terms (see below). However, running a search on Sara throws up some examples, often, it seems to me, with a slightly 'tongue-in-cheek' register. I particularly liked this one:
With John Cocks cursing the fact that he had not brought his tripod and frustrated by the lack of lighting equipment we had to content ourselves with lunch sans photography.
If you Google 'sans' and ask for pages only in English, results include Medecins sans Frontieres, Theatre sans Frontieres, and Mathematique sans Frontieres! It also occurs in technical terms, like type faces, such as Sans Serif. The latter is the only example of 'sans' I found in any of my dictionaries.

And now, sans any more time, I must abandon this soliloquy and plan some lessons!