Category: Media

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.

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 11 (La Journée des Allées et Venues) with links to definitions from Linguee and word frequencies from Google Books NGram Viewer.

In this chapter, Maigret first rails internally against the aloof, polished, Nordic, hyper-intellectual Letton qua Oppenheim, then openly follows him about town a bit. As they approach a bar, he witnesses a remarkable transformation: Oppenheim slips away and is replaced by the rough, ignorant slav Fédor Yourovitch. It dawns on Maigret that these are not simple aliases or disguises, but actual personality shifts that Letton can little control. Eventually, Letton manages to return to his Oppenheim persona, with a crushed whiskey glass and a cut hand in the picture. There’s something blatantly Jekyll and Hyde about the whole thing, with a none too charitable treatment of dissociative personality disorder.

All in all there are 8 pages, 23 unfamiliar words. Mostly about transformations, internal and external features, coming undone, bars, and smells:

Word notes

• exigu is my favorite of this bunch. It means “cramped” or “small”. It is not “cozy” or anything positive. I like the word because it fits three syllables into the tight space of just five letters, somehow embodying its own meaning.
• décousu is the past participle of découdre, which is the opposite of coudre = “to sew”. Décousu is translated as “disjointed” or “rambling”, but literally means something more like “unhitched” or “unraveled”, maybe “frayed”.
• désinvolture (“casualness”) is the noun form of the word désinvolte (“casual”) we saw in Chapter 10.
• racé meaning “distinguished” is not really all that common. Google NGram Viewer is conflating with with race meaning race.

Common words, uncommon meanings

• une coupure de cinq francs: the word coupure just means “a cut”, but here it is used to mean a denomination of currency. Could just as well have used un billet. My research found this sense of coupure being used these days more often in technical monetary discussions.
• par le truchement de: the word truchement means “intermediary”. But this entire phrase is universally translated as “through”. For example, Les organisations ne peuvent agir que par le truchement de leurs employés ou de leurs agents. = “Corporations can only act through their employees and agents.” But note what happened – the entire prepositional phrase in French gets reduced to just the preposition in English. You see this again and again in the sample of occurrences of truchment on Linguee. I find this remarkable; I don’t know other examples where a noun (as opposed to an interjection or an adverb) is universally dropped in the translation from French to English.
• un encaisseur de la Compagnie du gaz. By itself, the word encaisseur means “a collector” or “a cashier”. But here, it’s used to describe another patron sitting at the bar. How does Maigret know that’s his job? Was he actively working there? Did folks pay their gas bills not at the office, but at a bar? Fun to spin imaginative tales of how the 1930’s worked. As the word is now one in 17 million, it’s easy to dream up a way of life that has now vanished.
• fer à cheval is literally “iron on a horse” but more properly horseshoe. Here it’s used in the phrase le bar à fer en cheval = “a horseshoe shaped bar”.
• grime = “dirt” or “grime”. But by far the most common usage of this word is in the form se grime = “to paint one’s face” or “to make up”. Simenon uses it in the discussion of cops disguising themselves when undercover, while Pietr-le-Letton actually became these persona on the inside. The phrase also appears in the title of a famous print by Georges Rouault created in 1923, “Qui ne se grime pas?”.

• abattre ses cartes = “lay one’s cards on the table”. Abattre is “to slaughter”, and abattu can mean “killed”, or “felled” / “hewn” / “cut down”. More metaphorically, it can mean “depressed” or “down”. An abat-jour is a lampshade – it kills the daylight. So abattre ses cartes is to let the cards fall from your hand face up, revealing what was hidden. And of course un abattoir is “a slaughterhouse”, like this one I photographed 2018 in Roye, France, just casually plunked down a quarter mile from the old center of town:

I’m oddly curious about these cars parked outside the slaughterhouse. Were they there to purchase meat? Do they work there? Did they bring with them chickens, or very cooperative pigs to be butchered? Seems too grim for the cheerful shade of yellow paint.

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 10 (Le Retour d’Oswald Oppenheim) with links to definitions and word frequencies from Google Books NGram Viewer.

In this chapter there’s not much action, more internal brooding and some reveals. Maigret mourns at his desk, goes back to the tenement on rue du Roi-de-Sicile to confront the woman he interviewed there before, then returns to the hotel to fume as he sits in the lobby. He envisions the body of his dead colleague being taken out of the hotel on a stretcher through the service corridors. He pieces together the fact that his quarry, the villain Pietr-le-Letton, is the same man who plays the role of the elegant Oswald Oppenheim, and also the same man passing as Fédor Yourovitch, the immigrant husband of tenement woman. The chapter ends with him realizing he has no proof of all this as he watches Letton qua Oppenheim enter the hotel lobby resplendent in his finery.

A short-ish chapter, just 16 unfamiliar words. About half of them are interior decorating words as Maigret spends most of these pages sitting in and thinking about the hotel:

A few thoughts I had while looking up these words:

• limoger means “to fire someone” or “to sack”. This word was virtually unheard of in 1900, and has had a steady rise since, peeking right around 2000. Simenon seems to have caught this wave as it was building.
• râblé is typically translated as “stocky”. Both words are used almost exclusively in descriptions of people or animals, and it’s not obvious what other words in the language they are related to. Both words were nearly unused in their language before 1800. The word râble (without the accent over the final e ) means “back” or “saddle”, and occurs most often as describing an edible part of a rabbit: râble de lapin, râble de lièvre. Sounds tasty, from the recipe descriptions.
• colimaçon is a spiral staircase. Good word, that. The architectural feature has been around since about 150 A.D., and the word colimaçon came into broad use around 1760 and held remarkably steady for 240 years. Since 2000, though, it’s usage has shot up inexplicably. I wonder what spiral staircases everyone is talking about suddenly?

• osier and rotin both describe chairs. osier is “wicker” while rotin is “rattan”. I realized I didn’t know what the difference between these was in English, so I looked it up. Apparently “wicker” is the woven construction method while “rattan” is the fibrous vine that is used as material for weaving. Not sure why Simenon used both in the same chapter. Most people use them interchangeably in English, and apparently in French too, with osier being about three times more popular a word choice:

• mat is more commonly used as a noun, a synonym for tapis or carpet (i.e. a mat). But here Simenon uses it to describe the sound of somebody spitting down a stairwell at Maigret: “La salive tomba avec un bruit mat …”. The dictionary says “flat” is the translation of this use of mat (like a matte finish of a painted wall or a photograph), but if I were translating this I would not say “with a flat noise” I would write “The saliva fell with a splat …”
• clairsemé means “sparse”. Another good word to know. Simenon uses it in this short sentence describing the hotel lobby late at night: “Des domestiques clairsemés circulaient.” In my professional life, I often work with matrices: two-dimensional grids of numbers used to represent all sort of things. Calculations with matrices are a lot easier of most of the numbers in them are 0, and there’s a special name for these: “sparse matrices”. Alas, the accepted French term for “sparse matrix” seems to be matrice creuse, and not matrice clairsemé, though you will find this phrase in bad translations.

Onward to Chapter 11 !

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 9 (Le Tueur) with links to definitions and word frequencies from Google Books NGram Viewer.

In this chapter, Maigret goes hunting for the shooter who winged him in Chapter 7. Maigret doesn’t find the shooter, but does identify the spotter who pointed out Maigret as the target. He visits the spotters apartement, finds it empty, searches it.

My list of unfamiliar words in this chapter is pretty short. Mostly about the random stuff Maigret finds in the ratty apartment of a vaguely unsavory male nightclub dancer:

A few thoughts I had while looking up these words:

• reps here means a coarse weave in fabric, usually for upholstery. Also used to describe wire mesh.
• rapiécer (“to patch up”) uses the prefix ra- to mean “again”. This is also the case in an earlier word from this novel, raviser. I hadn’t known this existed, as opposed to the more common re- prefix. I wonder if there’s a pattern of when each one is used. 
• comparse means “sidekick”, “accomplice”, or “buddy”, but with a less-than-savory connotation. In researching its usage I’ve sometimes seen it translated as “stooge”, which I really liked and fit the situation perfectly: l’Union européenne ne parvenait à prendre une initiative et à jouer un rôle autre que de comparse des États-Unis, évidemment.
• The rarest word, véronal, is a sedative drug. Indeed, it was the first commercially available barbiturate, invented in 1903 by a German chemist working in Verona, Italy, and marketed under the name Véronale. The drug became common enough that the brand name turned into a common word. Its frequency in the Google Books corpus jumped when it was invented, grew during the 1930s, peeked around 1938, had a brief resurgence in the 1950s, then faded to near nothingness by 1985 or so. I bet commercial sales followed a similar pattern

• The word délester means “to offload”, “to relieve congestion”, or “to outsource”. It’s had a steady growth over 100 years. Simenon was reaching for an obscure, one-in-3.6 million word when he penned it. Now the word is more common jargon:

• The word instar is used almost exclusively in the phrase à l’instar de qqch, an expression that draws a similarity between two things or situations. I had not known this expression, but it’s fairly common today at 1-in-50,000 words. Here are some recent examples from Linguée:
  • Ici, à l’instar d’autres aspects des soins de santé, les gouvernements canadiens ont adopté deux stratégies.
  • À l’instar des années précédentes, la fourniture des statistiques s’est déroulée normalement en 2003.
  • À l’instar de plusieurs artistes de l’époque, il doit travailler fort et même se battre pour imposer ses idées nouvelles.

When Simenon used the phrase in 1931, it was leading a boring life, with a stable frequency over decades. Something happened in 1970 that launched this expression on a steady upward trajectory that took 40 years to peak in the 2000s, but had been pretty steadily declining since then. Did “group think” become a thing starting in 1970, and everybody had to showcase how their situations / actions / outcomes were universal? In the words of songwriter Jim Infantino, “Everybody’s trying not to be just like everybody, and I don’t want to be like that.”