Film editing

The seventeenth entry is le fichier allégé, and the first noun is one an English reader owns four times over without noticing. « File » covers four unrelated things in English, and French keeps a separate word for each of them. The thing on a computer is le fichier, which is this entry and nothing else. The cardboard wallet on a desk, and the matter it holds, are le dossier — le dossier du patient, un dossier de presse — and calling that un fichier would move it inside the machine. The steel tool that takes the burr off a key is une lime, a word with no relation whatever to the other three. And the line of people waiting at a door is une file, as in une file d’attente or en file indienne. The verb splits the same way: to file papers is classer, to file a claim is déposer, and neither of them is ficher, which means to enter somebody in an index and carries a chill the English verb does not.