“The good ones ripen, the bad ones rot
,” said Victor Hugo.
The leading writer of the 19th century is at the origin of a plethora of works that have marked the history of literature in France and around the world.
From
Bug-Jargal
(1818) to
Quatrevingt-treize
(1874), passing by
Les Misérables
(1862), the romantic author revived with his pen many forgotten terms of the French language.
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“The language has been tempered at its origins. [...] The poets have brought back into circulation a certain number of old necessary or useful words. We do not know that new words have been made”
, can we read in
Literature and philosophy mixed
(1834).
This verbal research, an integral part of the writer's style, has even allowed certain terms to pass on to posterity.
Anthology.
Octopus
In 1865, Victor Hugo was in exile in Guernsey.
He wrote
The Workers of the Sea
(1866) and borrowed from the language used on the island, a Norman dialect, the word “octopus”.
“The crab feeds on carrion, the octopus feeds on crabs.
The octopus stops a swimming animal, an otter, a dog, a man if it can, drinks the blood, and leaves the dead body at the bottom of the water,” he wrote
.
This term qualifies the mollusk hitherto named “octopus” in French.
Coming from the Latin "polypus", itself borrowed from the Greek "polupous" (properly "with many feet"), the "octopus" then entered everyday language.
Later, it also designates, by analogy, a tenacious, insatiable person who, in his demands, does not let go of his prey.
afflation
In
The Workers of the Sea
, Hugo uses the word “afflation” to refer to the blowing of the wind.
As can be read in the
Trésor de la langue française
, it is a term from the 15th century that can be found at the time in
Chroniques et Histoires Saintes et Profanes
to qualify the bise.
"Nothing is more demonstrated than these afflations with direct currents, and one day aerial navigation, served by the air-ships which we name, by mania of the Greek, aeroscaphes, will use the main lines of them", writes the exile
of Saint-Pierre-Port, without knowing however that he would be one of the last to use the word borrowed from Low Latin “afflatio” (“breath, swelling”).
Read alsoHow Molière's "Tartuffe" entered the French language
Sorgue
Since the 17th century, the “sorgue” (from the Provençal “sorn”, “sournois”) has belonged to the slang vocabulary.
Used to speak of supper in the expression "se refaire de sorgue", the word appears
in literature in the Mystères de Paris (1842) by Eugène Sue:
?"
Twenty years later, in
Les Misérables
, it is in its original meaning, in other words as a synonym for “night”, that Hugo makes Gavroche say:
“We don't say a dwelling, we say a piolle.
[…] And then we don’t say the night, we say the sorgue.”
The bone
For his ballad
Le pas d'armes du roi Jean
(1828), the romantic writer borrowed this time from the lexicon of the
Chanson de Roland
, an 11th-century text in which the word "los" is used:
"In sweet France lost my los.”
From the Latin "laus", "laudis" ("praise", "esteem, glory"), "los" is an aged term, indicates the French Academy, which means "praise".
“Los to the ladies!
To the king los!
See the flames of the closed field”
, writes Hugo.