The fashion industry

The twenty-fourth entry is le mélange de fibres, and the first noun belongs to a family English had already taken in three times over, without ever noticing that it was holding one word. Behind it stands Latin miscere, to mix, and its late form misculare, which Old French turned into mesler, also written medler. That verb came over early and gave « to meddle », which began as plain mixing and only later narrowed to mixing oneself into what is not one’s business. Its past participle, medlee, a mixture or a confused fight, gave « a medley », still a jumble of unlike pieces centuries before it was a run of tunes. Then the very same participle sailed again in its modern dress and produced « a mêlée », the scramble on a rugby field, which is « medley » a second time and nobody hears it. Le mélange was the last of the four to cross, in the seventeenth century, and stayed nearest the plain sense: things mixed, with no judgement attached.