פיל פילון אפו ארוך

The word "fil" (photographic film) is one of the funniest back formations in the Hebrew language. It entered everyday speach from English, as [film] and was immediately transformed into [filim] because Hebrew doesn't have double consonants at the end of its native words. Then the [-im] ending was stripped away since it denotes the plural of a masculine noun. The result is the silly word "fil", which is sadly becoming more and more common these days (as in this ad from the Kfar Yona paper). This back formation is quite misfortunate because it creates a homograph with the word "pil", elephant (both are written exactly the same...) As for myself, I use the word "seret", which has a close meaning and avoids the "fil" fiasco.