16-05-2025
A saucy French recipe made us go the full ‘monter'
Like linguistic magpies, we English-speakers pick up pleasing and useful words from around the world, as well as from the invaders who used to turn up here every few hundred years, and it has given us the biggest vocabulary in the world. How do others get by with fewer words? Do they make up for it with more inventive use of idiom and nuance?
We like to think not — indeed our word 'run' has 645 meanings on its own — but I was impressed by the variety of uses to which the French put monter, according to the Collins-Robert dictionary. Monter à Paris can mean, it says, to go up to Paris, to go to work in Paris or to move to Paris,
