Tax and duties

Twenty-first in this list stands l’assujetti, and the word is a lesson in what French does with a participle. Assujettir means to make somebody subject to something; its past participle, given an article, becomes a countable noun for the human being in that position — un assujetti, deux assujettis, les assujettis à la TVA. The same list offers le redevable, and elsewhere French builds un salarié, un retraité and un intéressé the same way, freely, whenever a new category needs a name. English has the pattern too, but frozen: « the deceased », « the insured », « the bereaved », « the unemployed » are a closed handful, they sit awkwardly with « a » and most of them refuse a plural. So the difficulty in l’assujetti is not its meaning but its shape. Where French names the taxpayer in one word, English has to build a phrase around a noun it supplies itself — which is exactly what the VAT rules do when they call this person « a taxable person », three words for one.