Presenting and dodging

The thirty-ninth entry is tenir le crachoir, and it is the one phrase on this page that cannot be worked out from its parts. Le crachoir is a spittoon, the basin that once stood in cafés and waiting rooms, built on cracher, to spit; nothing else in the modern language keeps the object alive. What the phrase means is to talk on and on while nobody else gets a turn, so that il tient le crachoir depuis une heure describes a table that has stopped being a conversation. English reaches for quite different pictures for the same behaviour: somebody « holds » forth, or « hogs » the conversation, or leaves the rest of the company unable to get a word in « edgeways ». Two things follow for a reader of this list. The register is familiar and faintly mocking, where the neighbouring entries prendre la parole and passer la parole are neutral and belong in minutes; used of a chairman it is a judgement rather than a description, and it is not said to the person concerned. And the verb is fixed: only tenir carries the phrase, while avoir le crachoir says nothing at all.