Building where the ground moves

Entry twenty-three is le cheminement des efforts, and the noun in the middle is the costliest false friend on this page. An English reader sees a word spelt like « effort » and hears trying hard, so the phrase arrives as something like the progress of everybody’s good work. It means nothing of the sort. In French mechanics un effort is a force carried inside a member, and the family around it is fixed vocabulary: l’effort normal is the axial force, l’effort tranchant is the shear, l’effort de traction is the tension, and les efforts in the plural are simply the internal forces a structure has to carry. So this entry is what an engineer calls the load path — the route by which weight and shaking travel down to the ground, beam to column to wall to footing, with no link missing anywhere along it. The everyday sense lives on beside the technical one, since faire un effort is still to make an effort, and only the subject of the sentence separates them. The rule of thumb is short: inside a building, read « force ».