Lift technology

The third entry is la poulie de traction, and the word in the middle is one an English reader owns already, in a sense French never gave it. La traction is pulling and nothing but pulling: la traction animale, un train à traction électrique, and la traction avant, which is a car pulled along by its front wheels instead of pushed by its rear ones. In everyday English the word has walked away from the rope and towards the road surface. A tyre « loses traction » on ice, a boot has « good traction » on wet rock, and a proposal that begins to catch on « gains traction » in a meeting. All three are about grip, and none of them is about pulling. French keeps a separate noun for grip, l’adhérence, and the sentence beside this entry leans on it: the sheave moves the ropes par simple adhérence, by friction alone. So « the tyre has no traction » comes out as le pneu n’a aucune adhérence, while la traction du pneu would say the tyre is being towed somewhere.