Month: August 2020

I’m making lists of unfamiliar words as I read George Simenon’s 1931 Pietr-le-Letton, the novel debut of the famous commissaire Maigret. Here’s my list for Chapter 13 (Les Deux Pietr) with links to definitions from Linguee and word frequencies from Google Books NGram Viewer.

This chapter is full of dramatic action. First the cliffhanger of the last chapter resolves as Maigret witnesses the Jekyll-Hyde like transformation of the refined, strong Pietr-le-Letton into the crude, weak Fédor Yourovitch. They talk a bit and are briefly interrupted by Le Letton’s wealthy criminal sponsor Mortimer. After he leaves, Maigret realizes that Letton qua Fédor’s mistress Anna is plotting to kill Mortimer from jealousy (recall the revolver in last chapter’s title – Anna wants Fédor to spend more time with her, less time criming). Maigret goes after him, but is too late to prevent the murder. He arrests Anna, but Pietr/Fédor escapes in the confusion.

The chapter spans 6 pages and contained 20 unfamiliar words. The words are mostly about emotional turmoil expressed in the face and body, physical struggle, and garments.

Word notes

• dépoitraillée means “bare-chested” from poitrine. Not only is it the word in this chapter with the lowest modern frequency (and nearly the lowest contemporaneous frequency in the whole book), the word doesn’t show up in Google Books corpus before 1855. Probably a neologism at that point. “A bodice ripper” is a dismissive English description of a sexully explicit romance novel. Maigret isn’t steamy stuff, but Anna’s bodice is indeed ripped as she struggles during her arrest.
• bonasse is excessively kind. Some translations make it “goody two-shoes”, “meek”, or “naïve”. Simenon uses it to describe Cain in the biblical story of the two brothers.
• écoeurant is “nauseating” or “revolting”. We saw its infinitive écoeurer back in Chapter 8, so I would normally omit this entry. But a reader pointed out to me that in modern Québecois, this word is generally used to have a positive meaning. This happens in English too: “That fastball was nasty. That was a filthy pitch” or “This cake is wicked.” They shared this helpful video lesson on the Québecois écoeurant with me as well.

• érailler is “to rub”, “to fray”, “to wear”, “to scuff”, etc. It’s another one of these words that is far more frequent in its past-participle used as an adjective (like crispé and saccadé from last chapter). While normally it means “worn” or “frayed”, it translates better as “hoarse” when describing a voice, which is how Simenon uses it here (une voix trop éraillé). One dictionary translates voix éraillé as “whiskey voice”, which is not an English expression familiar to me.
• trépigner literally means “to stamp one’s foot with emotion”, but is mostly used metaphorically. A common expression is «trépignent d’impatience», “bursting with impatience”: Vous trépignez d’impatience d’évoluer? It maps to the English animal-based metaphors “chomping at the bit” and “raring to go”. But also somewhat “milling around”: Simenon wrote «les femmes criaient par surcroît, pleuraient ou trépignaient» in describing a scene of hotel guests in the corridor after a the police arrive to investigate a murderous gunshot.
• blafard and exsangue are near synonyms, both meaning “pale” or “sallow”. Exsangue literally means “without blood” or “with the blood removed”. Curiously, livide also means “pale”, with the connotation of being the result of sickness or strong emotion. In English “livid” is more often heard as a description of extreme anger or rage (“He was livid when he learned his son had gambled away the money.”). But in English the color associated with this word is a dark, gray, bluish, purple (“a livid bruise”). From what I can tell, livide is primarily associated with white in French, but does have a secondary meaning of blue-ish.
• houle is an ocean swell or a wave. Simenon uses it in the poetic phrase «visage … blafard avec … des yeux couleur de houle». I like that houle is not really a color – it’s the ocean that is colored blue or green or gray – but by using that word the suggestion is that the person is experiencing a forceful swell of emotion, which is covered by the pallor of the rest of the face. Also, the word reminds by of hublot (porthole), though I don’t think the etymologies are connected.

Common words, uncommon meanings

• pan is a very flexible word. Un pan can mean “a section”, “a panel”, “a flap”, “a facet”, “a part”, “a face (of a mountain)”, “a branch (of a subject)”, “a segment (of a population)”, or “a framing member (in construction)”. Most of these meanings are actually common, but there are so many of them I thought it noteworthy. In this chapter Simenon uses it to describe «un pan de la pelisse», “a flap of the cloak”.
• pourpre is simply “purple”, and is mostly on this list because Simenon used it as a contrast with exsangue and blafard. I was confused, so I added it to research later. But it’s true that out of context, I was not 100% confident that this was just “purple” and not some idiomatic expression..

I’m making lists of unfamiliar words as I read George Simenon’s 1931 Pietr-le-Letton, the novel debut of the famous commissaire Maigret. Here’s my list for Chapter 12 (La Juive au Revolver) with links to definitions from Linguee and word frequencies from Google Books NGram Viewer.

In this chapter, Maigret gets a report from an underling about Le Letton’s mistress dining with a gun in her purse, broods about being an underappreciated cop, follows Le Letton around town some more, confronts him in his hotel room, and engineers a bluff to convince him he’s been thwarted. This triggers a sudden personality change in Le Letton (aided by several gulps of whiskey), but then the chapter ends (I wonder how you say “cliffhanger” in French?).

The chapter spans 8 pages and contained 22 unfamiliar words, including a few fairly common ones I’m glad to learn. The words are mostly about pursuing, hurrying, and being in pain.

Word notes

• péripéties is “adventures”. I learned the related word périple (“journey”) to describe a car trip I took last January from Paris to Marseille by way of several cities along the western and southern edges of France.
• envergure is “scale” or “magnitude”. It can be used whether the value is small or large, but is more common with large. Maigret chases des malfaiteurs d’envergure.
• crispé (“tense” or “uptight”) and saccadé (“jerky”) are past participles that occur as adjectives far more than as verbs. Crisper and saccader do exist, though.
• verrou is “a lock”, “a latch”, or “a bolt”. But the expression sous les verrous is used for jailed persons, akin to “under lock and key” or “behind bars”.
• envenimer means “to poison” or “to aggravate”. But reflexively, s’envenimer means “to fester”.
• inusité means “unusual”. It was less unusual to see it in 1930.
• califourchon is “straddling”, to describe a way of sitting on a saddle or on a chair. But acces à califourchon means “piggybacking” or “tailgating”, meaning a second person sneaking in without payment or authorization behind a legitimate entrant.
• porte-tambour is a revolving door, or literally a “drum door”. The door itself was invented in 1888 for use in skyscrapers. The French name for it underwent a mild shift over time. Even in 1930, it was more common to write porte à tambour; dropping the hyphen was less common. But around 2000 the gap between these formulations became far sharper (see graph), and now porte à tambour seems standard. Note the stated frequency of 1 in 69 million is not comparable the other words in this list because it concerns a multi-word phrase; NGram Viewer handles phrases differently from single words.

Common words, uncommon meanings

• jurer typically means “to swear” or “to curse”, which I knew. But in the expression jurer dans it means “to clash with”: C’était un sac de voyage vulgaire, qui valait tout au plus une centaine de francs et qui jurait dans ce décor.
• une démarche usually means an “action” or an “undertaking”, but it can also mean “gait”, i.e. the way someone walks. The word is quite common, but wasn’t familiar to me in any of its meanings.