Archives and records

The fifth entry is l’ordre primitif, and an English reader who trusts the adjective on sight gets the principle exactly backwards. « Primitive » has drifted in English almost wholly towards the crude and the unformed — primitive tools, a primitive hut, a primitive shelter — so that the word now carries a judgement and, turned on people, an insult. French kept the plainer meaning the Latin primitivus had, the first of its kind, and uses it wherever a first state is meant with no comment at all on its quality: la forme primitive d’un mot, le sens primitif d’un texte, la couleur primitive du mur, le projet primitif. So l’ordre primitif is simply the arrangement the papers were in when the office that made them let them go, and the whole rule of the trade is that this arrangement stays, even where it looks unreasonable. Write « the primitive order » and the sentence says the filing was rough, which is a verdict the French never passes; the term wanted here is « original order ». The same caution applies to primitivement, which means at first and not crudely.