I run a master class for French law students who want to learn how to practice law in English. My students have been tested and found proficient in English before they set foot in my class; basically, they are a group of A students.

As we do exercises together, my students raise points and ask questions that I can't answer. A selection:
  • What's the etymology of the bailouts that have been in the news so often lately? Is the idea that banks and other troubled businesses would be, through government intervention, bailed out in the fashion of a criminal defendant awaiting trial? Or are government efforts akin to scooping water from a canoe or fishing boat, the better to keep it afloat and running smoothly? Or is the rescue package comparable to what parachutists do, especially over enemy territory, when they jump from an airplane, usually heading into danger rather than away from it? Do all of these expressions share a common etymological ancestor?
  • English-language media have been writing for the past few weeks about a precipitating crisis. But French-language media have been pointing out a crisis –la crise– for deacades. Are the French predisposed towards pessimism (or clairvoyance)? Are Anglo-Americans inclined to manic optimism (or willful blindness), except when in dire situations? I sense and suspect a more prosaic explanation: those who taught the current generation of journalists were steeped in Marxism. References to class struggle and contradictions have ebbed, but crisis remains a catchy tag.