Midi Monday

This morning's Maigret word is 'midinette'.

A word which Littré does not deign to mention. But which Larousse explains is a conflation of 'midi' for midday and 'dinette' for snack or light meal, particularly the sort of thing that a small child or a group of small children might have. A conflation which used to be applied to the girls who worked in the clothing and fashion industries in central Paris, presumably because of the way they used to flock out into the cafés at lunchtime. Simenon uses the word crémaillères, which I think is roughly our milk bar. Perhaps the 'Shepherdess' at Old Street. With thanks to google for the instant snap above. But see also reference 1.

Micro Robert has the word, but only a short entry, only adding that one might use lectures de midinette for the sort of tripe that a shop girl might read. Whatever Mills & Boon is in French.

Collins-Robert (the one picked up for song in one of the Tunbridge Wells Oxfam shops) distinguishes one usage for a girl who does the work and another for a girl who sells it.

Google turns all of this up, in rather less time than it took to visit my various dictionaries. But in a rather cold way; none of the romance, none of the savour of a real dictionary.

PS: Larousse suggests that the usage was old in 1980, which suggests in turn that one might learn a lot of rather old slang if one learned one's French from Simenon (actually a Belgian, like Poirot). A regular Frenchman would presumably think your language rather old fashioned and probably would not know a lot of the old slang that you had picked up, while a cultivated Frenchman might even be able to work out that you had got it from Simenon.

I might also mention that the other day, for the first time in a long time, I came across an old Littré in a second hand book shop which was closing down in Garratt Lane, not far from Earlsfield Station. Two small hardback volumes, not very nicely printed and quite possibly smaller in content than my trusty Livre de Poche edition, from the late lamented Grant & Cutler of Great Marlborough Street. I might have done a fiver and I might have knocked him well down from the marked price of £35, but as it actually was, I passed.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/more-travel-variations.html.