I’m reading Nouvelle Vague by Jean Douchet, who was around at the birth of the fabled New Wave in French cinema, knew everybody, and has excellent taste — I recommend it to anyone interested in the topic (there’s a translation if you don’t read French). Along with film history, I’m picking up a lot of vocabulary; here are a couple of examples.
1) Talking about the young future Nouvelle Vague directors, Douchet writes “Ils savent donc qu’il leur faut affronter directement les règles du système pour le pénétrer … par effraction de préférence.” The word I’ve bolded was completely opaque to me; it turns out to mean ‘breaking and entering, burglary,’ but what surprised me was that it also exists in English! OED (1891 entry):
Breaking open (a house); burglary.
1840 The dwelling-place where the effraction was perpetrated.
New Monthly Magazine vol. 58 2771868 A riot, with effraction and murder.
H. H. Milman, Annals of St. Paul’s Cathedral iv. 801881 Such efficient instruments of effraction that no bolts or locks could resist them.
J. Payne in translation of F. Villon, Poems (new edition) Introduction 54
The etymology is “< French effraction, as if < Latin *effractiōn-em, formed as effracted adj.”
2) Describing the period before the founding of Cahiers du cinéma, he says: “Après la disparition de La Revue du cinéma (et de son fondateur Jean Georges Auriol) et de L’Écran français, il y avait véritablement disette en la matière.” Again, the bolded word was new to me; it means ‘scarcity, shortage, dearth,’ and the etymology is a tangle — TLFi says:
Orig. obscure. L’hyp. d’une formation sur dire¹* (v. rem. p. 246) d’après le sens de ce verbe dans les expr. formées à partir de à dire « manquant » (cf. dire¹étymol. 8 a et adirer*) (FEW t. 3, p. 69ᵇ; Bl.-W.⁵1ʳᵉhyp.) semble possible mais la forme d’a. fr. disgete reste alors inexpliquée. Un empr., à l’époque des croisades, au gr. byzantin δ ι ́ σ ε χ τ ο ς « bissextile », transcr. du lat. bissextus (par substitution de δ ι- « double » au lat. bi-) dans un emploi subst. au fém. avec la signification de « année mauvaise », cf. bicêtre¹, est possible et expliquerait la présence du terme en a. gênois dexeta (Schwyzer ds Z. vergl. Sprachforsch t. 56, p. 311; Bl.-W.52ᵉhyp.). Les hyp. à partir de formations latines comme desecta emploi subst. fém. du part. passé de desecare « séparer en coupant » (DIEZ⁵, p. 562) ou disjecta, emploi subst. du part. passé de disjicio « jeter, disperser, séparer, détruire » (Littré; A. Jenkins ds Mélanges A. Thomas, 1927, p. 311) ou decepta emploi subst. du part. passé de decipio « surprendre, tromper, décevoir » (Cornu ds Romania t. 32, pp. 124-125) laissent trop de difficultés phonétiques ou sémantiques inexpliquées. L’hyp. d’une orig. bret. (Gamillscheg ds Z. rom. Philol. t. 40, p. 528 et EWFS²), fondée sur une forme mod., est encore moins probable.
No conclusion to be drawn, but I like that they go into such detail.
Effraction for “burglary” – “breaking and entering” – seems backwards to me. German Einbruch, while Ausbruch refers to prison breaks as well as outbreaks of diseases, wars and other catastrophes. Is there any infraction…?
Effraction for “burglary” – “breaking and entering” – seems backwards to me.
The thought of die Tür/das Schloß aufbrechen may restore your orientation.
Is there any infraction…?
Infraction of a law, yes.
*effractio doesn’t seem to exist in Classical Latin, but the related verb effringo does; according to Georges, one of its meanings is “aufbrechen, erbrechen”, with citations from Plautus to Tacitus.
Ah, now it makes sense.
(Aufbrechen: “crack open”, including opening a locked door by force; erbrechen means “vomit” nowadays, but it’s also applied to breaking a seal and seems to have covered more of aufbrechen in earlier centuries – unsurprisingly, as er- means “to successful completion”.)
one of its meanings is “aufbrechen, erbrechen”
Frinstance:
clausa effringere, Schlösser u. Riegel aufsprengen, Sall. Iug. 12, 5.
[Lateinisch-deutsches Handwörterbuch: 1. claudo. Georges: Lateinisch-Deutsch / Deutsch-Lateinisch, S. 11105]
Forcellini’s 18th century monolingual dictionary has “effringere est vi quadam et impetu frangere”.
Forcellini was the original source for the large 19th century Latin dictionaries (including Georges). The TLL (still unfinished) and the OLD are the first dictionaries not based on Forcellini.
Just for kicks, I searched a large database of US judicial decisions for “effraction” and found a handful. You’ve got two old cases from Louisiana quoting from relevant legal texts (relevant in Louisiana because of its distinctive history …) written in French. You’ve got a Social Security case where someone was claiming disability benefits because of numerous alleged medical problems including “effraction of the heart,” which is a different sense if not simply a garbling of medical jargon. You’ve got an 1882 case from California where the federal judge (the Hon. Ogden Hoffman, Jr., 1822-1891) uses it as if it’s a normal bit of legal jargon that the reader will understand, meaning the breaking-and-entering element that traditionally distinguished burglary from mere larceny. And then you’ve got a 1983 case from Rhode Island written by a federal judge (the Hon. Bruce Selya, 1934-2025) who was quite notorious for sprinkling his opinions with fancy/obscure lexemes that were unknown even to people with unusually large vocabularies. That usage seems metaphorical – it was a patent infringement case not a burglary prosecution and the judge is pejoratively characterizing one side’s argument as “a bold effraction.” And that’s pretty much it.
Judge Selya previously on LH.
Well that was his schtick, and he was committed to the bit, such that his recent death led to a N.Y. Times obit headlined “Bruce M. Selya, Federal Judge Known for Polysyllabic Prose, Dies at 90.” He went on the federal bench in 1982, so that ’83 usage of “effraction” suggests that he was already doing it right out of the gate.