Origins and life events

Nineteenth on this list is le souvenir de famille, and it is the entry an English reader will get wrong with complete confidence, because the word looks borrowed and is. « Souvenir » came into English from French in the eighteenth century and then narrowed to one thing: the object a traveller brings home, a tea towel or a fridge magnet. French never narrowed it. Un souvenir is first of all a memory — j’ai un bon souvenir de ce voyage, ce sont mes premiers souvenirs — and the verb behind it is se souvenir de, to remember. Only from there does the word reach objects, and it reaches them as things that carry a memory rather than things that were sold to carry one. So un souvenir de famille is the watch, the letter, the ring handed down: what « heirloom » says in English. The tourist sense exists too, un souvenir de vacances, but it is the borrowed corner of a much wider word. The test is who paid: if nobody did, the English word is « heirloom » or « keepsake », and « souvenir » is simply the wrong register of object.