Astronomy and spaceflight

Le trou noir is the one term on this list that both languages have carried out of astronomy into ordinary speech, and they carried it in different directions. English kept the swallowing: money, time and paperwork disappear into « a black hole », and what the figure names is a destination from which nothing comes back. French has that reading too, but its commonest everyday use is about a person rather than a place. Un trou noir is a total blank — on stage, in an examination, at the moment of an accident: j’ai eu un trou noir, elle a fait un trou noir en plein oral. It is worth keeping apart from le trou de mémoire, which is the small lapse, the name you cannot produce and recover ten minutes later; le trou noir is the floor giving way, and it stretches as far as losing consciousness altogether. So the sentence in this list is astronomy and nothing else, while the same three words in a conversation are almost never about the sky. English has no one phrase for that and changes construction instead: « my mind went blank », « I drew a blank », « I blacked out ».