Law and the courts

Near the end of the list is le larcin, and its English relative has had the opposite career. Both come from Latin latrocinium, robbery, which is built on latro — a word that first meant a hired soldier and later simply a brigand. It travelled into old French as larcin, and from there, through Anglo-Norman, into English as « larceny ». Then the two languages sent it to opposite ends of the register. English promoted it: « larceny » became the technical name of the offence, grand and petty larceny, the word of the statute book — until the Theft Act of 1968 swept it out of England and Wales and put the plain Germanic « theft » in its place, which is why it now reads as either historical or American. French did the reverse and demoted it: no code uses le larcin, which has settled into a slightly literary word for a small pilfering — the apple, the coin, the stapler from the office. In a French statute the word is le vol.