The small of the back—the part of one’s lower back where the spine curves in—is so called because it’s the narrowest point. When Vladimir Nabokov wrote about that in English, he borrowed the sexy French word ensellure. This is part of a...
Martha talks about the hoopoe, that colorful, clownish, extremely smelly bird—with a likely linguistic connection to defrauded hedge fund investors.
gerb n.— «We go to a testing zone to light a lively gerb (a fire fountain named after the French word for “spray”).…In one room, I meet a jovial French couple who are busy sticking fuses into pink tubes which turn out to...