Numismatics

The twelfth entry is le degré de conservation, and the first noun is the one an English reader mistranslates without noticing. In English « degree » has one dominant everyday sense, and it is precisely the sense French never gives it: the qualification a university awards. Nobody in France holds un degré from a university. They hold une licence, un master or un doctorat, and the covering word is un diplôme. The trap is deeper than a simple gap, because le degré is already at work inside education with another job: it names the stage of schooling and not any award, so that l’enseignement du second degré is secondary education and un enseignant du second degré teaches in a school rather than in a university. What the two languages do share are the measured senses. Le degré is the step on a scale — vingt degrés, un cousin au second degré, une équation du second degré — and here the step running from worn to as struck. A degree that was earned is never un degré; a degree that was measured always is.