Old French

“In the orthography of the Felibres the diagraph ue is used as we find it in Old French to represent this vowel.”

Frederic Mistral

“Riff and raff are half-rhyming quasi-nouns from the Old French rifler, “to rifle, ransack,” and raffler, “to ravage, snatch away,” applied to things of little value.”

Simon & Schuster: The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time

“It is a clip of abate, from the Old French abattre, “to beat down,” and now it means “to moderate, subside, reduce, ebb.””

Simon & Schuster: The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time

“One proposed origin is in the southwest English shires: fainaigue, “to cheat; to renege on a debt; to deceive by flattery,” perhaps associated with the Old French fornier, “to deny.””

Simon & Schuster: The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time

“Old French position. very good one -- Registered on St. Baussont and did quite a bit of firing on Germans.”

Robert March Hanes Papers (#4534). Diary, 30 April-2 December 1918

“Let him build himself a log-house with the bark on where he is, fronting IT, and wage there an Old French war for seven or seventy years, with Indians and Rangers, or whatever else may come between him and the reality, and save his scalp if he can.”

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“In general, the twelfth-century Latin comoedia, the Old French fabliaux, and the medieval romance reveal this rhetorical formula in highly finished pictures of ideal beauty or extreme ugliness with very little suggestion of personal observation or shaded attitude.”

Dictionary of the History of Ideas