Evolution

The thirty-second entry is le registre fossile, and a word-for-word rendering produces the one English phrase no palaeontologist writes. English has split a job that French leaves to le registre alone. A « register » is a list somebody keeps on purpose and signs: the electoral register, the attendance register at a school, the register office. A « record » is whatever survives of what happened, kept deliberately or not, and it is the word for evidence of the past: the archaeological record, the written record, the geological record. So what the rocks hold is the fossil record. Nobody put it there and nobody countersigned it, which is exactly the point of the sentence on this entry, since it says the thing is full of holes. French asks for none of this. Le registre covers the parish book, the range a singer can reach and the tone a piece of writing is kept in, and it takes the fossils as well. The trap is a quiet one, because « the fossil register » reads perfectly well; it merely claims that somebody was keeping it.