Journalism and research

La source confidentielle is the plainest-looking entry on this list and the one with the longest memory. In French a source is first of all water coming out of the ground, and the noun is not built the way it looks: it is the old feminine past participle of sourdre, to well up, to rise from below. Sourdre in turn comes from Latin surgere, to rise, and that verb is still busy in English — in « surge », in « resurgence », in « insurgent », in « resurrection ». The noun English borrowed in the Middle Ages, « source », came over without its verb and has been an abstraction ever since; for the water itself English reaches for « a spring ». French kept both halves, so the water stays visible across the whole family: l’eau de source on a bottle, la source du fleuve, retenue à la source for tax stopped where the money rises, le code source. Only sourdre itself has gone quiet, kept for writing rather than speech. A reporter protecting a source is therefore guarding, inside the word, the place where something comes up out of the ground.