Hydraulics and pneumatics in French

The fifteenth entry is la conduite d’aspiration, and the second noun is the one to watch, because English keeps the same word for something no pump has ever done. In English, « aspiration » is what a person has: a hope, an ambition, something reached for. The only technical corners it still holds are medical, where a needle aspirates fluid, and phonetic, where a consonant is aspirated. Nothing in a workshop. French built the word straight on the physical verb instead. Aspirer is to draw in: la pompe aspire l’huile, and l’aspiration is the suction side of the circuit, the half that stands against le refoulement, the delivery side. From the same root comes the most domestic noun of all, un aspirateur, the vacuum cleaner, and passer l’aspirateur is to do the hoovering. The abstract sense does live in French as well — aspirer à une promotion, les aspirations de la jeunesse — so the word is split rather than false. But on a hydraulic drawing there is no ambition anywhere: read it as « the suction line », and keep « aspiration » for the person.