Cranes and materials handling

The first entry is l’appareil de levage, and the noun that opens it is one an English reader already owns, although it now hangs in a wardrobe. Un appareil is a device, a machine, a piece of equipment: un appareil photo, un appareil auditif, l’appareil respiratoire. Behind it stands the Old French verb apareillier, to make ready, to fit out, built on a popular Latin appariculare and, under that, on par, equal — to prepare a thing was to put its parts on a level with one another, to match them. English borrowed that verb in the Middle Ages and kept only one of the things it fitted out, the body. « Apparel » is clothing, « apparelled » is dressed, and the machinery stayed on the other side of the Channel. Two consequences follow for this page. A crane is un appareil and there is no apparel anywhere near it; and the noun heads a family of instruments across which English has to change word every time — un appareil dentaire is a brace, un appareil ménager a household appliance, l’appareil de l’État the machinery of state, and only here, on a building site, an appliance again.