Projects and how they run

The fourteenth entry is s’essouffler, and an English kitchen already holds the key to it. The verb is built on le souffle, breath, from souffler, to blow, which goes back to the Latin sufflare, to blow into. A « soufflé » is simply that verb’s past participle: the blown one, a dish puffed up by the air beaten into its eggs. English took the word for the dish and left the rest of the family behind. French kept all of it. Essoufflé is how you feel at the top of the stairs, and s’essouffler is to run short of breath, which is what a runner does on the last lap and what a reform does after its first winter. The two images meet in a phrase journalists like. When the excitement around a project or a candidate dies away, the paper reports that le soufflé est retombé, the soufflé has sunk, and the reader sees exactly what happened: all that height was air, and once the air went the thing was flat. So a project that s’essouffle is not short of money or goodwill; it is losing the breath that held it up.