faux pas
Pluralfaux pas
- 1A blunder that causes embarrassment or shows a lack of tact.
The senator's faux pas, a joke about the flood victims, dominated the evening news.
Newcomers to the office make all sorts of faux pas, like hitting reply-all on a message to the entire staff.
Similargaffe, blunder, slip, mistake, misstep
Note
The phrase is French for a false step, borrowed unchanged, and the stumble it names is social rather than moral. Chesterton drew the line in Charles Dickens (1906): a saint after repentance will forgive himself a sin, but a man about town will never forgive himself a faux pas. The plural keeps the same spelling: one faux pas, several faux pas.
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Origin
An unadapted borrowing from French faux pas (“blunder; misstep, false step”).