Falconry

The seventeenth entry is enter une plume, and both languages reached this operation from the same place, a nursery garden. French enter is the grower’s verb for grafting — enter un poirier, to set a shoot into a stock — and the falconer took it over whole, because splicing a sound feather into the stump of a broken one is a graft and nothing else. Modern French has largely moved to greffer for the orchard and for the operating theatre, which leaves enter sounding old everywhere but here. English made the identical move and then lost the trail completely. Its falconry verb is « to imp », and « to imp » once meant simply to graft. Behind it stands Old English impa, a young shoot slipped into another plant. From the shoot came the offspring, so that a child of a great house could be called an « imp » of it; from the offspring, by way of the phrase for a child of the devil, came the little malicious sprite the word names today. A French reader therefore meets a gardener where an English reader meets a goblin, and the wing under repair is the same wing.