Psychology and learning

The adjectives at the end of this list are the ones a report reaches for, and pérenne is the one an English reader will recognise and then place wrongly. Both words are Latin perennis, from per and annus: lasting through the year, and so through the next one. English kept the year where it was first useful, in the garden. « A perennial » is a plant that comes back from the same root every spring, as against an annual, and even the figurative use — « a perennial problem » — carries the idea of something that returns rather than something that simply holds. French went the other way and left the garden entirely, because a plant that comes back is une plante vivace. Pérenne now belongs to institutions, effects and money: un effet pérenne, rendre un dispositif pérenne, and the verb pérenniser, for which English has no single word at all. So the same year has gone two ways, and the trap is a quiet one: un financement pérenne is money that will still be there next year, not money that comes round again.