Seismology

The tenth entry is le mouvement du sol, and the short word at the end of it is one French noun covering four things English keeps firmly apart. Here le sol is the ground, the body of earth and rock a seismograph is bolted to. Indoors it is the floor: le carrelage du sol is the floor tiling, and poser un parquet au sol is to lay a wooden floor. In a field it is the soil a farmer works, so un sol argileux is a clay soil and l’appauvrissement des sols is soil exhaustion. And in music it is the note we call G: la clé de sol is the treble clef, and that one arrives from a mediaeval hymn rather than from anything underfoot. Four English words, then — ground, floor, soil and G — against a single French word that never announces which is meant. Only the subject of the sentence decides. On this page it is always the first of the four, and it is the one place where le sol is treated as something that moves rather than as the thing everything else stands on.