Tuesday's word

Now around two thirds of the way through the book first noticed at reference 2, in the middle of the tenth story therein, 'L'Amiral a disparu'. The admiral in question being a chap who had done time as a kitchen hand on a passenger liner and was now, in retirement, gracing his little country town in the south of France wearing the distinctive hat of an officer of the merchant marine, hence the nickname.

With kitchen hand being the translation I have settled on for aide cuisinier. Someone not very high up in the kitchen hierarchy. But see reference 3 for a French-Canadian take on the phrase.

The word which really got me going this morning was paquebot, which I have taken to be a large ship, carrying passengers and mails, after the fashion of, for example, a Cunard liner. Or indeed the Canadian Pacific liner I sailed on as a child.

With paquebot being a straightforward theft from the English 'packet boat', often abbreviated to 'packet'. With the packet originally being a small package of secret government documents on their way to Ireland, then a colony of England. Since then we have moved onto diplomatic pouches, these days often, so I understand, taking the form of an ordinary shipping container. Possibly with out of the ordinary seals.

We tended to use the phrase 'mail boat' or 'liner' for the same purpose, with 'line' getting a very large entry in OED. The first meaning for line as a noun is all to do with the flax industry, while the second meaning is the one we want, with the 22nd sub-meaning being 'a regular succession of public conveyances plying between certain places; e.g. the Cunard line … the White Star line'. This last being of Titanic infamy. By extension, the company owning those conveyances.

Liner has its own entries, with the 8th sub-meaning of the second meaning being 'a vessel … belonging to a 'line' of packets'. Alternatively, a battleship fit to sail in the line. A side of things, I suppose, the French did not want to draw attention to, having lost the Battle of Trafalgar.

In sum, the French have focussed on what is carried, while we have focussed on the carrier and the rather geometrical flavour of 'line'. Who is to say which is the better approach?

PS: an excursion into 'mail', reveals a moderate entry, but with five nominal meanings and four verbal meanings. The third nominal meaning covers the current use of the word, wending its way from parcel, as in the modern French malle, through to what was in the parcel, that is to say the mail. First meaning being to do with chain mail armour, the second with tax, the fourth a sort of coin and the fifth a relation of mall as in Pall Mall. A relation also of the modern French mail, inter alia a place where you might play boule, and with the French having a quite different word for the post.

Reference 1: Le Petit Docteur - Simenon - 1943. Volume VII of the collected works. It is explained somewhere, in French, but I have yet to sort out to my satisfaction why some of Simenon's non-Maigret detective stories are brigaded with the Maigret stories.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/01/marple-in-french.html.

Reference 3: https://emplois.ca.indeed.com/Emplois-Aide-Cuisinier-Aide-Cuisinière.