Courts and procedure

Twenty-fourth on this list is la signification, and an English reader who takes it for « significance » loses the sentence and the deadline with it. French has kept both halves of Latin significare, to make known. One half is meaning: la signification d’un mot, le geste n’a aucune signification. The other half is the act of making a thing known officially, and in procedure it has narrowed to one precise operation — the delivery of a document to a party by a court officer, with the hour written down. So le délai court à compter de la signification is about a date on a receipt, not about interpretation. The verb splits the same way: signifier is both to mean and to serve, so signifier un jugement is to have it served and signifier son congé à un locataire is to give formal notice to quit. English separates the two with unrelated words, « meaning » and « service », and the second keeps no visible link to signs. The French pair holds the older idea together: to serve a document is to make it known in a way nobody can later deny.