Customer service and complaints

Le verbatim is the entry on this page that an English reader will parse and still misread, because English owns the word and will not let it be a thing. In English « verbatim » is an adverb, straight out of the Latin verbum, word: you quote somebody verbatim, you take a note down verbatim. It stretches as far as an adjective standing in front of a noun, « a verbatim transcript », and there it stops. French took the same Latin adverb and made it a countable masculine noun. Un verbatim is one thing a customer actually wrote or said, copied out untouched; les verbatims are all of them together, the free-text column of a survey sitting beside the scores. So les verbatims en disent plus que la note is an ordinary sentence about which of two columns is worth reading, and it cannot be carried across word for word: what English has to say is « the verbatim comments », or « the free-text answers ». The article is the tell. Anyone who meets un verbatim and hears an adverb will read the sentence twice and find nothing wrong with it.