Sure, some of English is based on French, and there are a few words taken unmodified. But when it comes to legal terms, Norman French was used by lawyers in English-speaking countries for centuries. As a result, ideas and terms from French law are just taken wholesale by English-speaking legal systems (including grammar and syntax very foreign to English). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_French#Survivals_in_modern_...
'S what I just said. From your link: "It [French] was used in the law courts of England, beginning with the Norman Conquest." If the average person habitually used legal terminology the way they use words like, say, "toilet," the Frenchness of those words would be completely inconspicuous.
A more proper adjective for the way in which English "rips off" other languages would be aggressively, rather than shamelessly.
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." - http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Nicoll
