Setting up and self-employment

The twenty-eighth entry, le point mort, is the place in this list where a plain compound hides three trades. On a business plan it is the moment when the money coming in has caught up with the money going out, which English calls the break-even point: le point mort est atteint au bout de dix-huit mois. In a car it is neutral — mettre au point mort is to take it out of gear, and a learner driver in Lyon meets the phrase years before any accountant does. In an argument it is a deadlock: les négociations sont au point mort says nobody has moved for weeks. The thread running through all three is a point at which nothing is being transmitted, which is also why an engineer speaks of le point mort haut of a piston. English spreads those senses over expressions with nothing in common — break-even, neutral, at a standstill, top dead centre — so there is no one word to learn and no way to guess which sense is meant. Only the surroundings decide, and on a founder’s spreadsheet it is always the first.