Thursday, 7 July 2016

Transhumance

Still on 'La Nuit du Carrefour', helped along with visualisation of the scene by perusal of googlemaps and streetview for the two real places near where the action is set, Arpajon and Avrainville, to the south of Paris.

This morning's word is remue-mènage, a word (or perhaps more properly phrase) which in this context means the commotion caused outside of the village inn by the arrival of the crime scene people to deal with a corpse in a car just outside. According to Larousse, remue is the French word for transhumance, the seasonal movement of herders up and down the alps. While remue-mènage is more usually the sort of disturbance seen in household affairs on removal days.

Oddly, transhumance does not appear in my OED at all, with the best offer there being transhuman, or superhuman, from the trasumanar of Dante. I had to go to wikipedia to check that I had got the word right, not having used it for a while, probably some years.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/midi-monday.html for the last post of this sort.

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