Animals and nature

These are the words for a walk, and one of them is a trap that looks like no trap at all. La vague in aujourd’hui les vagues sont grandes is the wave of the sea, and it has nothing whatever to do with the English word spelt the same way. French has two words here, from two different languages, that happen to have arrived at one spelling. The feminine noun la vague came in from Old Norse through Normandy and has always meant moving water. The adjective vague — and the masculine noun le vague — came from Latin vagus, wandering, and is the one English borrowed: unclear, imprecise, drifting. So un souvenir vague is a hazy memory, un terrain vague is a piece of waste ground nobody has settled, and une grande vague is a large wave. The gender is the only thing that separates them, which is why the article matters more here than almost anywhere else on this page.