778-1: Feedback, Notes and Comments

Etiquette Following up my piece about this word last time, Marc Naimark noted: "Ticket has re-entered French from English. It means a bus, tram or subway ticket. A regional rail ticket could be either billet, which is probably the official term, or ticket, used by most people." Claude Baudoin added, "The French have also borrowed label (pronounced like la belle) for a seal of approval by some quality control organization. So you can have a label de qualité or simply label that tells you that a certain food item is organic, that an appliance is energy-saving, etc. This criss-crossing of words and meanings is really interesting."

Ambulance Anthony Massey wrote in similar vein about this word, also discussed last week. "In many European languages, ambulances have lost their wheels, if they ever had them, and have become buildings. So in Dutch, German and Danish, Ambulatorium means a hospital outpatients department. In German the department might also be referred to as Ambulanz or Spitalambulanz. In Danish I have found geriatrisk ambulatorium, a geriatic outpatients facility. In Polish, Ambulatorium could mean the outpatients department or the accident and emergency department, but always part of a hospital. In Serbian and Croatian (as we now call the language formerly known as Serbo-Croat) Ambulanta tends to mean a clinic or infirmary, but again somewhere which can treat emergency cases. In rural areas, such as part of Kosovo which I visited a few years ago, ambulanta would equate to a UK cottage hospital. The Albanian population would probably have preferred to call it a spital, the Albanian for hospital. But as this one had been built by the Serbs, the sign said ambulanta, and the locals told me in their best English (much better than my Albanian!) that they were taking patients 'to the ambulance', meaning 'to the hospital'."