Margins

More margins from 'La Guingette à Deux Sous', last noticed at reference 1.

I open with a périssoire, according to both context and Larousse, a kayak. And according to Larousse a derivative of périr, to perish. Perhaps kayaks were so named for the number of fatal accidents in their vicinity. Perhaps, less drastically, named humorously for their instability and general fragility. I suppose we talk of death-traps without always meaning it too literally.

Next a laissé pour compte, in this particular case of a hat left on a shelf out the back of a hat shop, something which had been ordered but then not collected or paid for, for some reason. In a limbo land between being charged up to someone's account and where? In any event, I have not been able to come up with a neat English equivalent.

And just before that we had a prisoner in a condemned cell moaning about not being allowed to smoke. I wonder if we were petty in this particular way when we used to hang people?

And while looking up laissé in Larousse, I noticed that the word for grouse was lagopède, literally hare foot. Google obliges with good illustrations of the feet of both grouse and hares, and while there is a vague similarity, it is not much more than that. Furthermore, the hare has four toes pointing forward while the grouse has three - just the sort of distinction that taxonomists get very excited about - with, for example, the even-toed ungulates being called the artiodactyla. All deflated a bit by Collins-Robert alleging that the French for grouse is grouse - but then it is well known that some dictionary compilers can't resist translating a word by the word itself, even when the justification is flimsy - with the compilers of the Harrap's dictionaries being particularly bad in this respect.

But maybe the connection is quite different: I was reading only yesterday that the keepers of deer stalkeries like to keep the hares down as they mess up the stalking - I suppose that the stalkers put up hares which alert the deer to the presence of stalkers. Or at least to the possibility of a presence, quite enough reason to run if you are a deer. So maybe one could concoct some story about grouse and hares.

Lastly, from the garden rather from Maigret, although Simenon does use the phrase of a hurrying Maigret, we have ventre à terre, said of something or someone running very fast, but also describing very well the forward movement of our visiting black cat when it is sliding forward to spring on a squirrel or a pigeon - and always missing in our experience. A cat which is mentioned here from time to time. For an early, if not a first, mention see reference 2. Again, I have not been able to come up with a neat English equivalent.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/vocabulary-time.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/trauma.html.