Electrical engineering and the grid

Second from last on this list is shunter, and an English reader owns the word already — which is exactly the trap. French borrowed the noun « shunt » from English in the nineteenth century, in its electrical sense: a path laid in parallel so that part of the current goes round something instead of through it. Having taken the noun, French did what it does with any borrowed noun it finds useful and hung the first-conjugation ending on it, the way it made scanner, zoomer and liker. That is where the two languages part. « To shunt » in English stayed near the rails and the resistor: wagons are shunted into a siding, current is shunted through a meter. Shunter left the workshop altogether. It now means to leave something out — shunter une étape, shunter la réunion — and, said of a person, to go round them: il m’a shunté. On this list the old meaning is back, and it arrives as an order: ne shuntez jamais une sécurité is about a safety device bridged with a wire, not about a step somebody skipped.