Running and the marathon in French

The list opens with l’allure de course, and its first word is the one an English reader is likeliest to mistranslate, because English owns the same six letters and means something else by them. « Allure » here is charm, pull, the quality that draws somebody in: the allure of a city, the allure of easy money. L’allure in French is a manner of going — a pace, a gait, a bearing. À vive allure is at a fast clip, tenir son allure is to hold a pace, and a horse changes d’allure when it moves from walk to trot. Nothing in it is attractive or unattractive; it is only how a body is moving. The two words are not a pair that drifted apart, because they were never one word. L’allure sits on aller, to go, with the ending that makes la brûlure out of brûler. English « allure » arrived from Old French alurer, to draw a hawk back with the loirre, the falconer’s lure — the ancestor of today’s le leurre, a decoy. So the honest French cousin of « allure » is leurrer, to lure, and l’allure de course is a speed and nothing more.