Tanning

The list opens with la peau brute, and the adjective on it is the one an English reader mistranslates without noticing, because the word is already in English and says something else there. Brut means raw, unworked, straight from the source: le pétrole brut, un diamant brut, des données brutes. From there it took a second job in accounting, where it means before anything has been taken off — le salaire brut, le poids brut — and its opposite in that employment is net, which English borrowed while leaving brut behind and saying « gross » in its place. What English did take is « brute », the noun for a savage animal or a violent man. The two words go back to one Latin adjective, but the branches parted long ago, and French keeps a noun of its own on the other one: une brute is a thug. So the trap is narrow. The adjective in la peau brute is the raw one, and brut de décoffrage, said first of concrete left as the formwork made it, is what French calls a person who says things without softening them.