Family history

L’usage des prénoms looks like « the usage of first names » and means something a good deal firmer: the custom, the settled family habit of calling the eldest son after his grandfather. L’usage does three jobs in French, and only one of them is the English word. The first is the plain act of using something: l’usage du tabac, à usage unique on a wrapper, hors d’usage of a thing that is past it. The second is the one at work here, custom: les usages du pays are its ways of doing things, il est d’usage de remercier par écrit says that this is what one does, and la formule d’usage is the sentence everybody writes because everybody writes it. The third is linguistic — le bon usage, un mot sorti de l’usage — and that sense English really does share. So a genealogist who reads l’usage des prénoms as a statistic about how often names are used has turned a rule that repeats over four generations into a frequency count, and will look for it in the wrong column.