Harbour and marine works in French

Les déblais de dragage is the dredged spoil, and the first noun catches out a reader of English, because « debris » is sitting right there and is the wrong word. French has both, and they belong to different verbs. Les débris, almost always plural, are what is left when something has broken: wreckage, fragments, the pieces on the floor. That is the one English borrowed whole, keeping the sense and dropping the accent. Les déblais come from déblayer, to clear a place of what is lying on it, and they are never the result of a breakage: they are the earth, sand or silt that somebody has dug out and taken away. The proof stands opposite them on every earthworks drawing — le remblai, the fill that is brought back and put in. Déblai and remblai are a matched pair, out and in, and where French has one word and its mirror image, English reaches for « cut and fill », two words with no family resemblance at all. So on a dredging contract les déblais are a volume, measured and priced by the cubic metre. Read them as « debris » and a quantity turns into a mess.