Ethnology

The fourth entry is la description dense, and it is the one term on this page that must not be translated by the word it looks like. The idea was set out in English first, and the name it was given is « thick description »: an account that reports not only the twitch of an eyelid but everything that twitch was understood to mean by the people watching it. French settled on dense, which says packed, close-grained, full of matter, and which is praise — un texte dense is a good text, and une analyse dense is one worth reading twice. Our own « dense » went the other way. Said of a piece of writing it means heavy going, and said of a person it means slow-witted, which is its commonest use of all. So « a dense description » reads here as a description that is hard work to get through, the exact opposite of the compliment the French term carries. Write « thick description », the term the discipline actually uses, and leave dense to do its own job at home.