Databases

Le balayage complet de la table is the full table scan, and the noun inside it is one English has borrowed without noticing what it does at home. Balayer is to sweep, from le balai, the broom, so le balayage is a sweeping — and French sends that anywhere something passes evenly across a surface. It is the radar turning, le balayage du radar; it is the beam crossing an old screen line by line, le balayage de l’écran; and it is what an engine does when it walks a table from the first row to the last. « Sweep » never took that technical work in English, which says « a scan » for all three. What English did take is the French word itself, and only for hair: « balayage » in a salon is lightness painted on in strokes, one narrow sense lifted out of a wide ordinary one. A reader who knows the loan and not the source will therefore hear a hairdresser here, when what is being swept has rows in it — and nobody chose the sweep. It happens when the index is missing.