Affût
One of the great, unforeseen advantages of my scribal shrine is that it's a great place to hang Post-It Notes. I have a dispenser on the desk; the notes come out in fanfold. Very handy. But I never knew what to do with the notes once I'd written them.
Usually, the notes constitute a horizontal to-do list. Do this, call that. Today, there is only one Post-It in view. On it, I have written the French word affût. I don't know what this word means. Its denotation, "carriage, mount," is clearly not the sense in which it's ordinarily used. A l'affût seems to mean "in hiding." The phrase être à l'affût de means "to be lying in wait for" or "to be on the lookout for."
That's all very well, but when the word pops up in French texts, none of the foregoing makes complete sense.
Comments
How about Post-It Note Software from 3M have you tried that? If you had it you could type in this link to affût so nicley found by Google in Dictionnaire de l'Académie françoise by Académie française. Parked here in Dalton, Georgia for the night I can pop open Dictionnaire de l'Académie françoise along with thousands of other texts. It may not be progress but it's damn sure convenient, just as convenient as electronic Post-It Notes. There is only so much you can fit into forty eight square feet of living area and the first thing is a bed, eh? The attached thirty two square foot office space has a big picture window but not much room for a library of bound books.
Posted by: George | August 7, 2007 11:15 PM