So if nothing else, I conclude that the weird long a version is yet another American innovation in speech. Maybe something they came up with at Yale.

I followed the link to the French Wiktionary, which has the audio of a male voice saying it with the short a and more or less silent s- “fracah”.

I much prefer being a poseur in the French language by imitating Pepe le Pew in the Warner Bros. cartoons.

“I was off to caucus, and feelin’ raucous, so I started a fracas.”

Always pronounce foreign origin words in some way vaguely but not necessarily accurately like their language of origin, one sounds edumacated.

Works for foreign place names, too. I gather from Mandarin speakers that hardly any westerners get Beijing right, pronouncing the B and j wrong [zh, like a French j, is wrong] and not using tones so really the whole thing is a mess. Barely better than Peking, which we also got wrong back in the day.But just try to say something closer to a hard j in certain circles in North America. When I listen to my favourite Mandarin speakers, it’s more like a hard j crossed with ch, and with a singsong rising tone on the second syllable.

But I digress.

It makes borrowing words into English hardly seem worth it if we have to keep using chichi foreign accents. But I don’t necessarily want to go back to Anglo-Saxon at this late date. What a dilemma.