Packaging technology

The eleventh entry is la résistance à l’écrasement, and the verb inside it seems to have made the rarer journey, from English into French rather than the other way. Dictionaries of French usually derive écraser from Middle English crasen, to break or shatter, a verb that had itself come in from Scandinavia. French added the prefix and narrowed the sense from shattering to pressing flat: écraser une boîte, écraser l’ail, se faire écraser by a car. English kept the old verb as « craze », and its first meaning still lives in the workshop. A glaze that is « crazed » is covered in a web of hairline cracks, and « crazing » is the same fault in a clear plastic tray or bottle, a defect this trade knows well. « Crazy » began there too, as something full of cracks, before it moved to the mind. So whoever reads a stacking report and a materials report side by side meets one verb twice: once as the case that gives way under the load, once as the surface that splits without collapsing. The dictionaries put a « probably » in front of the borrowing, and it belongs there.