Children and bringing them up

The list for a household with children in it. In the middle of it is le couvre-feu, the time by which somebody has to be home, and it is the English word « curfew » with its seams still showing. In medieval towns a bell rang in the evening and everybody banked the hearth for the night: couvre-feu, cover the fire. English borrowed the whole phrase as coverfeu and wore it down to « curfew », where neither half is legible any more. French never wore it down, so a parent setting le couvre-feu à vingt-deux heures is using the name of a fire-safety bell without noticing. The word also does the political job in both languages — a state-imposed curfew is le couvre-feu too — and it is one of the few cases where the French is the older-looking word and the English the eroded one.