Quote:
I believe that toodle-pip is related to toodle-oo which I was once told resulted from British Soldiers in the First World War being unable to say "Tout a l'heure, alors".

OED says "origin unknown" but the first citation is 1907 so that could be about right.

Quote:
The English "fillet" is such an old word (although originally from Latin via Old French according to wikipaedia) that I suspect that the French pronunciation in American restaurants was for effect and it stuck.

On this one OED says that the spelling "fillet" supplanted "filet" (except as a French affectation, as which it never went away) during the 1600s, which of course is roughly when US English was forked. It's possible that US English always spelt it "filet", but originally pronounced it fillet, with the French pronunciation filtering down from pretentious restaurants to supplant the phonetic reading.

I'd been to the US several times before I realised that the restaurant chain "Chick-Fil-A" was intended to refer to chicken fillets, and not to chickenfilla, which had always sounded unpleasantly close to Polyfilla.

Peter