Winter sport

L’avalanche de plaque is the slab avalanche, and the noun in the middle of it is one of the few words English took from the mountains rather than from the court or the kitchen. It arrived in the eighteenth century, spelling and all, in the luggage of travellers describing something they had seen in Savoy. Its own history is older and much less tidy. The Alpine dialects of that region had lavanche, a word with no Latin ancestor anybody can point to, and French did not so much borrow it as rebuild it — the thing that did the rebuilding was avaler. That verb means to swallow today, but its first business was going down, because it is à val, valleywards, the same val still standing in en aval, downstream, and in en amont, its opposite. A dialect word for what comes down a mountain and a verb that meant to go down met halfway, and the result looks as though it had been French from the beginning. So the « avalanche » on an English hazard sign is a mountain word twice over, and the swallowing that seems to be inside it was never there at all.