Road construction

L’enrobé is the past participle of enrober pressed into service as a noun, and the verb comes apart into en- and la robe: to put a robe on something, to wrap it up. That is precisely what the material is, stone chippings each given a thin coat of bitumen, and French uses the same verb for a sugared almond and for bad news wrapped in soft words. The garment underneath has a rougher history than the road suggests. La robe came into old French from a Frankish word meaning booty, the clothing stripped from a beaten enemy, and that same root reached English twice: once as « rob », once, through Norman, as « robe ». The two are one word split in two, and a paving contract is quietly using the second of them. Two habits follow. La robe in French is seldom a robe: it is a woman’s dress, the coat of a horse, the colour of a wine in the glass. And « enrobed » survives in English mostly in the chocolate factory, so l’enrobé has no counterpart at all and must become « asphalt » or « bituminous mix », with the coat left behind.