Parliament and procedure

The thirty-fifth entry is le ministre fantôme, and the second word of it is a suffix in all but name. Hung on the end of a noun, fantôme does not describe a ghost; it says that the thing named exists on paper and nowhere else. Une société fantôme is a shell company with an address and no staff, une facture fantôme was invented by somebody, une ville fantôme has been walked out of, and un wagon fantôme is on the manifest and not on the train. Medicine keeps the literal reading in une douleur fantôme, the pain felt in a limb that is gone. The pattern therefore always subtracts, and an English reader meeting this entry expects a minister who is not really one. That is precisely what it is not. Le ministre fantôme is a sitting member with a real brief and a real diary, because the phrase is a loan translation of « shadow minister », carried over whole from Westminster. It is the single place where fantôme adds a person instead of removing one, and the two languages reached for different ghosts to do the same job.