Organ building

The twenty-sixth entry is la réverbération d’une église, and the verb inside it has left a word standing on every French street that an English reader will never connect to it. Réverbérer is to throw back — light, heat or sound — and it is the ordinary word for what a nave does to an organ. In the eighteenth century the lamps hung across Paris worked by that very trick: an oil flame in front of a polished metal dish that threw the light downwards onto the street. The lamp was named after the trick, and called un réverbère. The dish and the flame went long ago, the name stayed, and un réverbère today is simply a street lamp, the thing a car backs into and a film hero leans against. Nothing of the sort happened in English. « Reverberate » stayed indoors with sound, « reverberation » is what an acoustician measures, and the lamp outside is named for where it stands rather than for what it does. So a French sentence carrying un réverbère is about the pavement and not about the acoustics — although both words descend from the same Latin verberare, to strike.