Meteorology and the forecast

The forty-fifth entry is la sortie du modèle, and the noun in the middle of it is one English already owns, which is precisely the trouble. « A sortie », in English, belongs to the army and the air force. It is the sudden attack made by a besieged garrison, or one operational flight by one aircraft, and that is the whole of its range. French put the same word to work on the ordinary business of leaving, and it now does four jobs. It is the way out, the word above the door, la sortie de secours. It is the act of going out, so à la sortie de l’école means when school comes out. It is an outing, une sortie en mer. It is the release of a book, a film or a machine, la sortie du nouveau modèle. And in any technical trade it is what comes out of an apparatus or a calculation, which is the sense on this page: the figures the overnight run has produced. A reader who hears the aircraft in it turns a night of arithmetic into a raid. Where English would say exit, outing, release or output, French says sortie four times over.