Palaeography

Entry twenty is l’imagerie multispectrale, and the first noun is where English divides and French does not. English grew two words off one stem and keeps them well apart. « Imaging » is the technical business, as in medical imaging and satellite imaging, which is the work this entry describes; « imagery » is the figurative one, the pictures a poem or a speech leaves in the mind. Nobody writes « medical imagery », and a critic who offered « the imaging of a sonnet » would be corrected at once. French asks l’imagerie to do both, and gives it a third job of its own. The technical sense is the commonest: l’imagerie médicale, l’imagerie satellitaire, l’imagerie par résonance magnétique. The mental one survives with a shade of cliché about it, so that toute une imagerie de la Révolution means the stock of familiar pictures rather than the events. The third is a trade: l’imagerie populaire was the making of cheap coloured prints, and out of it comes une image d’Épinal, a scene prettier and simpler than what it shows. The rule is therefore one-way. Both English words land on l’imagerie; coming back, only the sentence around it says which.