Would you like a visit to the
“sewers”
of Paris? This is what a small official blue sign in the capital suggests, a few meters from Place de la Résistance. The latter was spotted by attentive passers-by and taken up on X by translator Muriel Gilbert, with humor:
“Where is the big fofôte?”
. Because in fact, the term
“sewer”
does not take a circumflex accent on the u.
If the fault seems like nothing, it nevertheless means a lot. The term
“sewer”
, which refers to the pipe system used for the flow and evacuation of domestic and industrial water, comes from the verb
“drain”
. Because this is where rainwater and user water “drip”.
On the contrary, the terms
"taste"
and
"disgust"
refer to a person's judgment, first from a taste point of view but more generally from an aesthetic point of view. They come from the Latin
“gustus”
, which then gave
goust “food, food”
in our medieval language. The circumflex accent is therefore the trace of this missing S.
This mistake on a public sign refers to the recent and amusing Carcassonne scandal. An
“Avenue Pierre Curry”
plaque was installed and then urgently removed by the town hall, after several calls by residents and mockery from Internet users. It was to pay tribute to the famous physicist, Nobel Prize winner, husband of Marie Curie, and who distinguished himself in particular through his work on radioactivity, Pierre Curie.