Describing trends

The list opens with flamber, and a reader of English who recognises it will recognise the wrong thing. English took this verb once, kept only the past participle and put it to a single use: « flambé » is a dish with spirits poured over it and set alight, and « flambéed » is what the waiter did to it. That is the whole of the borrowed word, and it smells of brandy. French kept the verb and all of its heat. Flamber is what a dry roof does when a spark reaches it, and the picture it carries onto a page of figures is a fire taking hold: sudden, visible from a long way off, past controlling. So les prix du bois ont flambé après la tempête is neither a gentle climb nor a record — it is a blaze. The noun to store beside it is la flambée des prix, which newspapers set in headlines, and the honest translation is « prices shot up » or « prices soared », never anything with a pan in it. The cognate is real; the borrowing simply stopped at the kitchen door.