gossip (idle talk); cancan (dance)
“C'était madame Langlois, madame Caron, madame Dubreuil, madame Tuvache et, régulièrement, de deux à cinq heures, l'excellente madame Homais, qui n'avait jamais voulu croire, celle-là, à aucun des cancans que l'on débitait sur sa voisine.”
Supposedly, this word originates with a dispute at the Collège de France circa 1550, over whether to use a traditional French pronunciation of Latin or a reconstructed pronunciation of Latin. One of the points of most dispute was the pronunciation of qu, with the word quamquam exemplifying this: it was pronounced in reconstructed Latin as [ˈkʷam.kʷã(m)] but pronounced in French Latin as /kɑ̃.kɑ̃/ ("cancan"). After this debacle, a "cancan" came to be "any kind of scandalous performance".