574: excité Jul 4, 2016

The way to form the past (perfect) tense and/or participles in many languages is usually just with a prefix or a suffix on a verb-stem. Excusing exceptions, a common way to do this in English is with the '-(e)d'. The French way to do this is often with an 'é'. So in that was 'passé' means 'passed', 'décidé' means 'decided' and 'arrivé' means 'arrived'. All of these cognates hopefully make logical sense, since they were originally French words anyway. You might expect that 'excité' would therefore mean 'excited', which is sort of true, but it really means 'horny'. Although both words come from the same Latin root, we got words such as 'incite' and kinetic', while the French used it sexually.