Palaeography in French

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.