Entomology

The twenty-second entry is l’organisme de quarantaine, and the noun in the middle is a false friend hiding in plain sight, because here it means exactly what an English reader expects — a living thing — and almost nowhere else in French does it. Open a newspaper and un organisme is an institution. Un organisme public is a public body; un organisme de formation is a training provider; un organisme payeur is the agency that hands out a subsidy; un organisme de placement collectif is an investment fund; and les organismes sociaux are the bodies that collect contributions and pay benefits. English never does this. « Organism » belongs to biology and stays there, while the institutional work is shared out among « body », « agency », « organisation » and « scheme ». The direction of the mistake is worth fixing in the mind. A reader who meets un organisme agréé in a plant health regulation and pictures a microbe has read a licensing authority as a pest, and the sentence turns inside out. Here, beside la quarantaine, the biological sense is the right one.