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:
| expression (root) | Frequency in 2010 | Frequency in 1970 | Frequency in 1930 |
|---|---|---|---|
| instar | 1 in 50,400 | 1 in 222,000 | 1 in 315,000 |
| mondain | 1 in 103,000 | 1 in 124,000 | 1 in 107,000 |
| broncher | 1 in 329,000 | 1 in 365,000 | 1 in 235,000 |
| comparse | 1 in 794,000 | 1 in 970,000 | 1 in 953,000 |
| délester | 1 in 843,000 | 1 in 2,530,000 | 1 in 3,660,000 |
| escarpin | 1 in 1,110,000 | 1 in 3,870,000 | 1 in 3,550,000 |
| rapiécer | 1 in 1,960,000 | 1 in 2,670,000 | 1 in 2,440,000 |
| perdreau | 1 in 2,840,000 | 1 in 2,430,000 | 1 in 1,580,000 |
| frusques | 1 in 7,120,000 | 1 in 9,390,000 | 1 in 11,300,000 |
| reps | 1 in 19,800,000 | 1 in 9,740,000 | 1 in 7,090,000 |
| véronal | 1 in 45,400,000 | 1 in 5,070,000 | 1 in 3,730,000 |
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.”