Hotel operations from the inside

Eighteenth on this list is la gouvernante, and an English reader who translates it by the word it resembles hires the wrong person. « Governess » in English means one thing only: the woman engaged to teach the children of a household, a post that survives mostly in novels. French la gouvernante covers that sense as well, and always has — la gouvernante des enfants — but it carries a second one that English keeps well apart: the woman who runs the housekeeping of a large establishment. In a hotel the second sense is the only one anybody means. La gouvernante heads the floor staff, inspects the rooms before an arrival, holds the linen and answers for the state of every bedroom in the house; in a big one she is la gouvernante générale, with a floor housekeeper under her. English calls her the head housekeeper, or the executive housekeeper, and the word « governess » never comes near the job. So the trap is not that the two words mean different things. It is that the French one means both, and the hotel sense is the one a dictionary prints second.