Cryptography

The twenty-fourth entry is l’attaque de l’homme du milieu, and the noun at the end of it does three separate jobs in French, only one of which English ever borrowed. The first is plain position: le milieu is the middle, so au milieu de la nuit is in the middle of the night and en milieu de semaine is midweek. That is the reading this attack needs, somebody standing between two parties. The second is the surroundings a thing lives in: le milieu naturel is the natural environment, un milieu acide is an acid medium in a laboratory, and le milieu familial is somebody’s home background. That is the sense English helped itself to, and « milieu » here means a social setting and nothing else. The third has no counterpart at all: with the definite article and no complement, le milieu is organised crime, so un règlement de comptes dans le milieu is a gangland killing and un truand du milieu belongs to it. Carry that third sense into a protocol diagram and the attacker acquires a criminal record.