Environment and energy

The list for a household rather than a summit. In the middle of it is le tri, the sorting of rubbish, and an English reader already owns this word without recognising it. Middle English trien came straight from old French trier, to pick out, to separate the good from the bad — and that is still exactly what the French verb means: trier les déchets, faire le tri, and figuratively faire le tri dans ses idées. The sense « to attempt » is a later English development, from testing a thing by picking at it. The old meaning has not gone: it is still audible in « tried and tested », in « to try out », and in a court « trying » a case, which is a sifting of evidence. So the word on this page is an English word that stayed at home while its twin emigrated and changed jobs.