Diplomacy

The fifth entry is la note de protestation, and the noun that closes it has a twin in English that will take a reader the wrong way. Both languages had the word from Latin protestari, to declare a thing openly before witnesses, and each kept a different half of it. French carried la protestation across to objection, and that is its ordinary sense now: une protestation officielle is a formal complaint, protester contre une mesure is to object to it, and la note de protestation is the paper by which one government tells another that something will not be accepted. English kept the declaring and let the objecting go. « A protestation » is a solemn assurance, and almost always about oneself — « protestations of innocence », « protestations of loyalty » — with a faint suggestion in it that nobody quite believes the speaker. So « a protestation note » is not English at all. The paper is « a note of protest », or « a protest note », and what a government lodges is « a protest ».