Property valuation

The twenty-fourth entry is l’évaluation du portefeuille, and the long noun in it is a compound a reader can open with a knife. It is porter plus feuille, carry plus sheet, and it began life as a flat case for loose papers. « Portfolio » is the same object built by the same rule, except that English did not build it: the word was borrowed from Italian portafoglio, from portare and foglio, which is porter and feuille translated piece by piece. From there the two words cover different ground. The holding of shares and bonds is shared, and so is the minister, since « a minister without portfolio » answers un ministre sans portefeuille exactly. What English never took is the first and plainest sense, because le portefeuille is also the thing in a jacket pocket with banknotes in it, and for that « portfolio » is useless: the word is « wallet ». So inside a valuation file the noun behaves itself, and outside one a reader has to decide each time whether the object is worth ten million or twenty euros.