Fact for the day

Quite by chance this morning, I discovered that morse is the French word for a walrus, from the Lapps, via Russia.

I wonder if Colin Dexter knew this when he invented his famous detective?

From where I associated to the walrus moustaches said by Simenon to be sported between the wars by a lot of the policemen in Paris who came from some particular region in the middle of France, well to the south of Paris.

From where I tried to find an illustration of same, which proved difficult. The first hurdle was finding out that what I call a walrus moustache is called a horseshoe moustache bu those in the know. But even then, even the subsequent switching from Bing to Google did not do the business.

A quick peek in the back of Larousse turned up some famous Frenchmen with moustaches, but not the sort of thing that I had in mind, and of which I have seen plenty of pictures in the past. Perhaps the sort of thing that I had in mind was from the lower, rather than the higher orders, with only these last appearing in Larousse. The idea might have worked though, because with the name of a Frenchman from Larousse, one can go to Google and he will usually turn up the very same picture, or something very similar.

Eventually I thought to ask Google for poilu, a word used of French infantrymen in the first world war, and that produced the snap included above. The right sort of idea, although the tails of the moustache are not as long as I had hoped for.

Curious how the Internet has these blind spots, but perhaps something better will turn up in the days to come.

PS: Littré tells me that the French also call walruses sea horses and sea cows - phrases which mean something quite different to us Anglophones.