Softie

Met up with a young French scientist today, an atmospheric physicist. He's the grandson of the professor of literature who was my inspiration in becoming an academic, though he never knew his grandfather, who died before he was born. For that matter, I haven't seen the now physicist since he was a toddler, the year I spent in Paris! Today was very strange, not least because, bearded, he now reminds me of pictures of his grandfather as a youth!  

We spoke English but I kept thinking about what I should say were we speaking French. Perhaps he was speaking French inside too. When I explained that I'm at a university with as good as no sciences, he said that we have "soft sciences." Unfamiliar with this term, I rhapsodized on how English, unlike French and German, generally doesn't use the "science" word for the sciences humaines, though we do for social sciences... And I guess we do speak of "hard sciences"!

All this reminded me of how plentiful are the faux amis - words which look the same in two languages but have different meanings - between French and English. Collège and professeur generally refer to high schools, not universities, for instance. My physicist's mother, with whom I've only recently been in contact again after many years' hiatus, had written that her two sons had both become scientifiques. Does that make me a scientifique, too, albeit not dur but molle?