Politics and society in French

L’affrontement a été évité de justesse is a sentence about two camps very nearly coming to blows, and the English word it resembles belongs somewhere else. « An affront » is an insult — a slight offered to one person, usually in words — and « to affront » lives only in that narrow use. French affronter means to face something squarely: affronter la tempête, affronter un adversaire, affronter la réalité, and on the sports page les deux équipes s’affrontent samedi, which says no more than that they meet. So un affrontement is the meeting of two forces, violent or merely political — un affrontement entre manifestants et police, l’affrontement des deux candidats à la télévision — and it says nothing about hurt feelings. Where English needs a word for that meeting it picks « clash » or « confrontation »; where French needs one for the insult it keeps un affront, a noun that has held on to the narrow old sense the verb left behind. The trap is therefore half a trap: l’affront does match « affront », and everything built on the verb does not.