Working from home

Halfway down this list stands la frontière entre travail et vie privée, and the noun inside it is one that English readers should hand back before they use it. « Frontier » and la frontière are the same word: English took it from Old French, where it had been built on le front, the side of a thing that faces outward. The two have since drifted into opposite shapes. La frontière is a line with a country on either side of it — passer la frontière is to cross a border, la frontière franco-suisse is a place on a map — and that sense carries over neatly to the line this entry draws between the desk and the kitchen. « Frontier » in English is not a line at all but an edge with nothing settled beyond it: the frontier of medicine, the American frontier. So rendering the entry as the frontier between work and private life promises a wilderness where the French meant only a door. The words to reach for are « boundary » and « the line », and, for the political sense, « border ».