Construction law

The seventh entry is la ligne d’implantation, and the noun inside it is a word English owns and has shut away in a clinic. In English, « implantation » belongs to surgery and to embryology and almost nowhere else, so it arrives on a building drawing looking badly out of place. French uses the same word for the plainest thing there is, which is where something is set down and made to stay. Implanter une usine dans la région is to establish a factory there; une entreprise bien implantée is a firm with a solid footing in its market; le plan d’implantation is the layout drawing that shows what stands where on a site; and la ligne d’implantation of this list is the line the front wall has to sit on. The word even reaches the body without a knife anywhere near it, since l’implantation des cheveux is the hairline, simply where the hair is set into the scalp. Under all of it is the Latin plantare, to plant. So in a building file the word to think of is « siting », or « setting out », and the operating theatre can be left out of it.