Physics and forces

Near the end of the list sits la grandeur, and an English reader who trusts the spelling will misread it every time. In English, « grandeur » names an impression and nothing else: the sweep of a landscape, the scale of a building, the air somebody gives themselves. There is no measurement anywhere in it. In French the measurable sense is the ordinary one, and une grandeur is a quantity — anything that can be measured and given a unit. Chaque grandeur a son unité is a sentence about metres and seconds. That is why a French textbook has une grandeur scalaire and une grandeur vectorielle where English says « a scalar quantity » and « a vector quantity », and why l’ordre de grandeur is the order of magnitude. French does keep a lofty sense as well — la grandeur d’âme, la grandeur d’un pays — so the asymmetry runs one way only: the measured half is the one English cannot reach. Translating « the grandeur of the cathedral » as la grandeur de la cathédrale reports its size and leaves the admiration out.