The French word fait entered English twice. Once, in days of old, when knights were bold; and, again, during the era in which a gentleman could provoke a duel by saying ‘You, Sir, speak no language … not even French’.
The first importation of fait gave us ‘feat’, which, in keeping with the Law of Peculiar Importation, covers much less ground than its Gallic incarnation.1 (While fait can refer to many different products of many different actions, the accomplishment of a ‘feat’ presumes a degree of danger or, at the very least, difficulty.) The second voyage gave us two separate expressions. The first of these, fait accompli, does a good job of filling a gap in our lexicon.2 The second, au fait, has yet find honest work.
The earliest English-language example of au fait that I have found dates from 1793. In that year, one of the first playwrights to ply his trade in the new United States inserted that expression into the Frenchified speech of a character named O’Whack.3
By the powers! You’ve hit it. Ma foi! He is toujours wanting to get into notice; and between our three selves, he keeps me as his valet, frizeur, and all that, only because I perplex, and make a noise, and am quite au fait at botheration wherever I go.
A century later, American writers were still making fun of people who said au fait. Consider this deathless ditty, the work of the second-best humorist to come out of Missouri in the nineteenth century.4
If sometimes I choose
To meander the rues
Where Johnny Crapaud à la mode parley-voos
My wild wooly way
Is regarded au fait
And seldom I deign to remark 'see voo play'
The fate of au fait owes much to the many other ways we can make the same point without, dare I say it, saying a word that sounds like ‘fey’. Thus, rather than saying ‘Elfswythe’s talk was perfectly au fait’, folk can, with greater ease as well as better effect, simply say that ‘Elfswythe hit the nail on the head’.
Fait accompli, however, does work that no other expression can do. That is, while sometimes translated as ‘done deed’ or ‘accomplish fact’, it refers, strictly speaking, to deeds done (or facts accomplished) in ways that are especially hard to undo (or, if such a word existed, dis-accomplish).
Consider, if you will, the case of a precocious practitioner of the fait accompli, the formidable Mary Alice Aforethought.
'Mummy’, said little Alice, ‘see the kitten that I found? Daddy bought some food for her. Uncle Cedric made a box for her to sleep in and Aunt Frideswide knitted her a little blanket. May I keep her?'
For Further Reading:
The Law of Peculiar Importation states that ‘when a word passes from one language to another it will often take on a much narrower meaning’. For example, the Spanish word queso. When at home, it describes all manner of fromages. However, when it crosses the Rio Grande, it indicates an overpriced mockery of cheese sauce often served with tortilla chips.
Note bien, Gentle Readers, the robots working for both Deepl and Google Translate provide inaccurate pronunciations of the French version of fait accompli. In particular, they fail to pronounce the terminal ‘t’ that announces the impending arrival of a word that begins with a vowel. Thus, I have linked the word to a YouTube video that explains both the proper French pronunciation of fait accompli and the way that well-spoken Anglophones say it.
Frederick Reynolds Notoriety: A Comedy (London: T.N. Longman, 1793) page 9
Eugene Field A Yankee Abroad (Boston: The Bibliophile Society, 1917) page 5