Earlier this week I finished reading George Simenon’s 1931 novel La Tête d’un Homme, the fifth adventure of the famous commissaire Maigret. It spans 135 pages in the Tout Maigret edition from Omnibus and took me just 3 days of reading to get through – summer evenings are good for that. I noted 101 unfamiliar words as I read, though I’ve tightened my standards for familiarity. In earlier posts I included only words and expressions I couldn’t recall even in context. In this list, I’ve included any word I didn’t think I would recognize and know the meaning of if I saw it in complete isolation. So the list is longer than usual. In fact it is so long, I’m going to split it into two posts so that I don’t tire of writing and my readers don’t tire of reading. I’ve posted the first batch of fifty below, with links to definitions from Linguee and word frequencies from Google Books NGram Viewer.
The novel is pretty good, though it still has that pre-Agatha-Christie style of setting up some exotic and even grotesque situation in advance, and then only revealing it to the reader bit by bit. There’s no puzzle for the reader to figure out, and the whole thing is so contrived as to be unbelievable. Add to that some melodrama and mustache-twirling level cartoon villain, and you’ll know what to expect. Yet with all that, it was a good book. The plot that unspools – an obviously framed man goes to jail protesting his innocence but going silent in the face of incriminating evidence; Inspector Maigret anonymously orchestrates the man’s escape in order to trail him afterwards; the suspect gives Maigret the slip and then re-emerges in unexpected ways; the true villain finally appears and loses to Maigret in a battle of wits – is entertaining and at times original. There’s even a fair number of action scenes that successfully generate suspense and surprise outcomes. And Maigret seems far from infallible, which is an important ingredient for a detective series. So all in all a good direction for the series to be going.
The unfamiliar words are disproportionately about positions body’s can be found in and verbs that change them: avachi (slumped), s’affaler (slouch, sprawl), jucher (perch), bosselé (dented, deformed), califourchon (stradling), un loque (a wreck), coudoyer (jostle, press up against), chanceler (wobble, falter), frôler (brush, nudge), entre quatre yeux (head-to-head).
Here’s the first part of the list, from chapters 1- 5, sorted by modern word frequency. Recall that the value is estimated by counting all words in all French books Google knows about in the given decade. For comparison, the masculine definite article le occurs with a frequency of 1 in 60, while all the union of all articles (le, la, les, un, une, de, des) taken together account for 1 in 8 words. .
| expression (root) | Frequency in 2010 | Frequency in 1970 | Frequency in 1930 |
|---|---|---|---|
| écho | 1 in 29,100 | 1 in 46,500 | 1 in 57,900 |
| rame | 1 in 144,000 | 1 in 139,000 | 1 in 125,000 |
| cordon | 1 in 159,000 | 1 in 122,000 | 1 in 74,000 |
| frôler | 1 in 183,000 | 1 in 351,000 | 1 in 391,000 |
| greffier | 1 in 237,000 | 1 in 125,000 | 1 in 82,300 |
| soulier | 1 in 243,000 | 1 in 162,000 | 1 in 143,000 |
| broyer | 1 in 250,000 | 1 in 210,000 | 1 in 172,000 |
| bribe | 1 in 266,000 | 1 in 641,000 | 1 in 845,000 |
| broncher | 1 in 329,000 | 1 in 365,000 | 1 in 235,000 |
| terne | 1 in 383,000 | 1 in 304,000 | 1 in 252,000 |
| renifler | 1 in 403,000 | 1 in 977,000 | 1 in 1,500,000 |
| grignoter | 1 in 437,000 | 1 in 985,000 | 1 in 1,590,000 |
| chanceler | 1 in 497,000 | 1 in 471,000 | 1 in 392,000 |
| pneumatique | 1 in 545,000 | 1 in 207,000 | 1 in 307,000 |
| jucher | 1 in 570,000 | 1 in 833,000 | 1 in 839,000 |
| pétiller | 1 in 602,000 | 1 in 1,060,000 | 1 in 884,000 |
| éperdument | 1 in 699,000 | 1 in 988,000 | 1 in 731,000 |
| ornière | 1 in 730,000 | 1 in 746,000 | 1 in 735,000 |
| blafarde | 1 in 777,000 | 1 in 967,000 | 1 in 856,000 |
| écroulement | 1 in 796,000 | 1 in 568,000 | 1 in 507,000 |
| rixe | 1 in 857,000 | 1 in 875,000 | 1 in 793,000 |
| carrosserie | 1 in 930,000 | 1 in 757,000 | 1 in 451,000 |
| glabre | 1 in 1,020,000 | 1 in 432,000 | 1 in 224,000 |
| affaler | 1 in 1,030,000 | 1 in 2,230,000 | 1 in 3,300,000 |
| loque | 1 in 1,060,000 | 1 in 769,000 | 1 in 497,000 |
| cuir chevelu | 1 in 1,330,000 | 1 in 2,410,000 | 1 in 1,100,000 |
| froissement | 1 in 1,340,000 | 1 in 1,260,000 | 1 in 725,000 |
| douille | 1 in 1,390,000 | 1 in 995,000 | 1 in 648,000 |
| califourchon | 1 in 1,580,000 | 1 in 2,480,000 | 1 in 2,400,000 |
| remorqueur | 1 in 1,660,000 | 1 in 841,000 | 1 in 317,000 |
| débardeur | 1 in 1,690,000 | 1 in 2,810,000 | 1 in 2,820,000 |
| avachi | 1 in 1,790,000 | 1 in 4,440,000 | 1 in 7,990,000 |
| potelé | 1 in 1,830,000 | 1 in 2,580,000 | 1 in 2,220,000 |
| planton | 1 in 1,920,000 | 1 in 2,170,000 | 1 in 2,010,000 |
| crépu | 1 in 1,980,000 | 1 in 2,190,000 | 1 in 1,730,000 |
| falot | 1 in 2,160,000 | 1 in 1,370,000 | 1 in 1,020,000 |
| bosselée | 1 in 2,610,000 | 1 in 1,830,000 | 1 in 915,000 |
| bock | 1 in 3,380,000 | 1 in 3,380,000 | 1 in 1,910,000 |
| lorgnon | 1 in 3,560,000 | 1 in 2,130,000 | 1 in 1,150,000 |
| sidi | 1 in 4,100,000 | 1 in 8,580,000 | 1 in 10,500,000 |
| coudoyer | 1 in 4,760,000 | 1 in 1,600,000 | 1 in 779,000 |
| cahin-caha | 1 in 4,830,000 | 1 in 7,480,000 | 1 in 8,690,000 |
| se morfondre | 1 in 4,980,000 | 1 in 10,600,000 | 1 in 11,500,000 |
| à portée de voix | 1 in 6,280,000 | 1 in 13,900,000 | 1 in 28,300,000 |
| rapin | 1 in 7,260,000 | 1 in 4,310,000 | 1 in 2,510,000 |
| sauterie | 1 in 9,020,000 | 1 in 13,000,000 | 1 in 8,490,000 |
| triporteur | 1 in 10,100,000 | 1 in 9,220,000 | 1 in 61,700,000 |
| entre quatre yeux | 1 in 25,700,000 | 1 in 48,800,000 | 1 in 71,900,000 |
| pot de grès | 1 in 38,100,000 | 1 in 32,800,000 | 1 in 24,400,000 |
Word notes
- un triporteur is a 3-wheeled cycle, with one wheel in back and two wheels in front on either side of a box or trunk for cargo. These were popular for delivering cargo or for peddlers to go around town selling their wares, though the word was super rare in writings of the time. The item and the word are still in common use in modern France.
[Collection Jules Beau. Photographie sportive] : T. 16. Années 1901 et 1902 / Jules Beau : F. 25v. [Course de Tri-Porteurs, 26 janvier 1902]; 
- glabre means “hairless”, either from shaving or from baldness. It was a fairly common adjective in 1930, but has been falling since 1950 and is now a one-in-a-million rarity.
- cahin-caha describes a slow, erratic pace of progress; patchy, staggered, or struggling.
- un remorqueur is a tug boat. Tug boats were increasingly big in France for about 70 years, reaching their peak mention just a few years before this book was published. Then there was a sudden crash (the Depression?) and things never recovered.
- se morfondre is a great verb, meaning to languish or to mope. Apparently folks do that twice as often now as they did 90 years ago.means “hairless”, either from shaving or from baldness. It was a fairly common adjective in 1930, but has been falling since 1950 and is now a one-in-a-million rarity.
- sidi is an honorific title for a man from North Africa, but also is an ethnic label: Commissaire! criait le sidi qu’on poussait vers la porte.
Common words, uncommon meanings
- un écho is a sonic reflection, of course, but it can also mean a newspaper column dedicated to gossip and anecdotes about politicians, celebrities, etc. Here is was the vehicle for the paper to print a titillating anonymous letter claiming the prison escape was actually orchestrated by the police.
- une rame is an oar or a paddle, but less commonly means a train: Des rames de métro ébranlaient un pont proche.
- un cordon is a rope or string, typically for a curtain or bell. But it is also an archaic term for a rope used by a concierge to open the door of a building. In that context, «demander le cordon» means “ask to be let in”.
- une bribe is a scrap, a snippet, a shred. This is not to be confused with the english “bribe”, a payment to induce an official to act against their duty. In French, the verb to bribe is soudoyer, while the noun for a bribe is the colorful pot-de-vin – jug of wine. Curious that the French bribe has steadily become more common, tripling in frequency in 80 years.
- un pneumatique in modern parlance is a tire, usually shortened to un pneu. But in 1931 it referred to a message delivered by pressurized air tube. Paris had an extensive network of pneumatic tubes that remained in operation for over 100 years, from 1868 all the way through until 1984! I am old enough to have encountered such a system in the 1970s in the New England hospital where my father worked. I find the notion of a city-wide network astonishing.
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