Commercial vehicles

The last entry is la conduite en peloton, and the noun that ends it is one English has already borrowed, with the spelling roughed up on the way across. Le peloton is a diminutive of la pelote, the small ball of wool or string that a cat plays with, and that in turn goes back to Latin pila, a ball. The step from a ball to a body of people is the clump: figures packed close and moving as one lump. Soldiers drawn up in such a knot were un peloton, and in the seventeenth century English took the word over as « platoon », doing what it could with the nasal ending. The French word never emigrated, and it now holds three posts at once: the infantry unit, the bunch of riders in a bicycle race — le peloton a rattrapé l’échappée — and, grimly, le peloton d’exécution, the firing squad. The sense here is the newest of the four, lorries running nose to tail under one radio link, and English calls it « platooning »: the same ball of wool coming back over the Channel.