Speaking and presenting

La séance de questions is the part of the programme where the audience gets to speak, and the word in the middle of it is one English borrowed and then buried. Une séance is simply a sitting: the stretch of time during which a set of people are seated together doing one thing. A court holds one, a committee holds one, a cinema holds one — la séance de vingt heures is the eight o’clock showing — and so does a physiotherapist, une séance de kiné. The set phrase séance tenante, which means on the spot, is literally with the sitting still being held. English took the word in the nineteenth century, kept the accent on it, and handed it to the spiritualists: « a seance » is a gathering held in order to speak to the dead, and it is used for almost nothing else. That is the whole of the trap. The French word covers every occasion on which people sit down together for a purpose, and the English one has kept exactly one of them, the strangest.