More Maigret

That is to say, three more words from Maigret which caught my attention.

First, sharecropping. It seems that Maigret's family came from a line of sharecroppers, métayers in French, a form of landholding which I do not think has been common in this country for a long time, although I think you used to get sharecroppers in the US, a rather low form of agricultural life. But have I got this right? Littré also talks of métairies also meaning, by extension, small farms generally. I could try and find a translation of the book in question and hope that the translator had done his homework. Or what? I don't think my French is up to browsing French agricultural tenure sites. Or should I be looking in Simenon's mother country, Belgium, on the grounds that this is the sort of thing he would have learned about young, before he turned up in Paris (and on canals) and started writing books?

Second, suitable. Reading the word souhaitable, something to be wished for, it struck me that this was clearly the origin of our word suitable. Checking with OED this morning suggests that I was wrong. OED has more than three pages about suit before getting onto the straightforward derivative suitable. It seems that it started out as a legal term in the middle ages, then extending to a an action or process, ending with suit for or pursuit of a  woman. Then onto groups of followers or suites, and perhaps from there to to the sort of uniforms that might be worn by members of a suite. Branching out from there to various other sorts of matching and clothing. Decks of playing cards. But nothing to do with the aforementioned souhaitable.

Third, aire, known to me as the name of the sort of large laybys you get, or at least used to get, on major roads in France. Places at which to stop, stretch your legs and picnic. Perusing Larousse and Littré, I also find threshing floors, one of the thirty two points of the compass when used to specify the direction of the wind, polygons in the plane, tectonic plates, the field of action of something or someone and a flat place up a cliff where an eagle has made its nest. Also the area of a polygon, which last is fair enough as Littré says that aire comes from the Latin area and OED says that our word area is also from the Latin area, a vacant lot in a town, and only got to mean square yards by extension.

It struck me this aire was clearly the origin of our word eyrie, which, in consequence, has nothing to do with it being up in the air, as I had vaguely thought. Checking with OED made difficult by the word being listed under 'a' for aerie rather than under 'e' for eyrie. This being just two of the four available spellings. I had not realised before that OED does not include cross references for this sort of thing, at least not universally. Got there in the end when BH got out her Concise.