Tax law

The thirty-second entry is la décision de taxation, and its last noun looks like a word an English reader already owns. It is not quite. « Taxation » in English is the whole business of levying taxes: a system, a burden, a subject for economists, and it is uncountable, since nobody receives « a taxation » in the post. French la taxation is narrower. It is the act by which an authority fixes the amount of one particular sum, and it can be counted: une taxation d’office is an assessment the tax office makes by itself when the taxpayer has filed nothing, and la taxation des dépens is a court officer putting a figure on the costs of a case. So la décision de taxation is the notice that fixes what this taxpayer owes for this period, and the English for it is « the tax assessment ». English once used its word that way too, and kept it in the law of costs, where the « taxing master » survived until the reforms of 1999. The verb hides one more trap: taxer quelqu’un de naïveté costs nobody a penny, it accuses them of being naive.