Bridge building

The twenty-fourth entry is le confortement, and an English reader who hears « comfort » inside it has heard the word correctly and understood it wrongly. Both go back to Late Latin confortare, built on fortis, strong, and meaning to strengthen thoroughly. Old French conforter carried that sense into English in the Middle Ages, and the old force survives in the fossilised legal phrase « aid and comfort », which is help given to an enemy and not sympathy offered to one. English then let the word drift towards consolation and from there towards bodily ease, until a comfortable chair had nothing to do with strength at all. French kept the builder’s sense: conforter un mur is to shore a wall up, conforter une hypothèse is to lend weight to it, and le confortement d’un ouvrage is the strengthening of a structure that is to be kept rather than replaced. For consolation the language uses another verb, réconforter. And le confort, the noun about armchairs, was borrowed back from English in the nineteenth century, so both halves of the story now stand in French as separate words.