Vocabulary

[Vue de la Meuse à Givet]

A short digression, triggered by my thinking that the Davies adaptation of the book at reference 1 had strayed rather a long way from the original, even when making allowance for crushing 125 or so pages into 50 minutes or so.

This led to the book itself, where, on page 284, I find the phrase 'sa face houleuse' in the context of the Meuse in flood at night with the surface whipped up by the wind. It occurred to me that Simenon was using 'face' where we might use 'surface'.

I then get to a list of vaguely related words: face, surface, visage, figure, plan and plane. Most of which, according to 'Le Petit Larousse', mean roughly the same thing in French as in English - but with differing pattern of usage.

With the exception of a carpenter's plane which is 'rabot' in French and 'figure' which we do not much use for face in English. And a quick scan of the two pages given over to figure in OED gives lots of interesting meanings, all more or less related, but no faces.

While face itself gets around four pages. Again, all more or less related to human faces, but extending to coal faces and type faces.

PS 1: Givet is a town in France, on the Meuse, in a tongue of land sticking into Belgium, rather in the way that Malden Rushett sticks into Surrey. I think the gist of reference 3 is that its place in France was consolidated during the incessant wars of Louis XIV.

PS 2: according to Larousse, 'rabot' is derived from a word for rabbit, of which more in due course. Also a relation of our carpenter's term 'rabbet'. Possibly obsolete.

PS 3: it was also a morning when BH surfaced the book noticed two years ago at reference 4, from somewhere near the bottom of the heap on her bedside locker. I had forgotten what a bloody and complicated business the colonisation of the interior of what is now the United States was at times.

PS 4: I wonder sometimes why I find the etymology of words so fascinating, a fascination which I believe I share with my mother. While only yesterday, I was reading about a small tribe - sometimes called the Iatmul - in New Guinea at reference 5, a tribe which used to go in for noisy and sometimes violent debates in the men's house:

'... On the one hand there are men who carry in their heads between ten and twenty thousand polysyllabic names, men whose erudition in the totemic system is a matter of pride to the whole village ; and on the other hand there are speakers who rely for effect upon gesture and tone rather than upon the matter of their discourse...'. [page 126]

Plus ça change. And I have read of plenty of other tribes, from various places around the world, who were keen on words in much the same way - so my fascination does have roots. I dare say Freud had something to say about it all if the title of reference 6, turned up by Bing, is anything to go by.

PS 5: I began with Maigret so it seems right to end with him. Last night, we watched the Davies adaptation called 'A touch of pride' and I was at a loss to know from which story it had been taken. Eventually, the brain traced back from a character called Dédé to the story at reference 7 and checking proved the brain right. Whoever had adapted the story had had the neat idea of transposing this story about the young Maigret onto Lapointe, who is a youngster, unlike Davies who clearly is not. Not a problem for a writer, he can jump around in time as much as he likes - but not something that works on a screen, for a television series.

References

Reference 1: Chez les Flamands - Georges Simenon - 1932. Volume IV of the Rencontre edition. Story 3 of 4.

Reference 2: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chez_les_Flamands. 

Reference 3: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Givet.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/05/life-in-minnesota.html.

Reference 5: Naven: A survey of the problems suggested by a composite picture of the culture of a New Guinea tribe drawn from three points of view – Gregory Bateson – 1936.

Reference 6: Masculinity, Motherhood, and Mockery: Psychoanalyzing Culture and the Iatmul Naven Rite in New Guinea – Eric Kline Silverman – 2001.

Reference 7: La Première Enquête de Maigret - Georges Simenon - 1949.