Site management

La location de matériel is a single line in a site budget, and an English reader can misread both halves of it. La location has nothing to do with where anything stands. It is the hire, the renting: la location d’une grue, un contrat de location, louer une pelle à la semaine. For the place a thing occupies, French says l’emplacement. Both words descend from the Latin verb locare, which meant to put in place and also to let out for money; English kept the putting and French kept the letting. Then le matériel: it is the plant and the equipment, the machines and the tools, and it is uncountable. What a wall is built out of is les matériaux, plural in that sense. So le matériel est loué et les matériaux sont livrés — the kit is hired, the materials are delivered — and whoever reads matériel as « material » has the wrong invoice in front of him. One further trap on the same page: louer also means to praise, a separate verb that happens to have fallen together with this one.