Do the French have a term for “word power”?
I have spoken to native French speakers, rummaged through dictionaries and searched various websites and I cannot find a term/phrase for “word power” in French. Google Translate gives “le pouvoir des mots”, one native French person suggested “force de mot” but wasn’t happy with that. Any ideas?
I look forward to your feedback.
davidmich
another suggestion:
maîtrise des mots
And what do you think this phrase means in English? Are you intending it to mean an extensive vocabulary, a persuasive style, an erudite style, an effective selling style, or perhaps a hard-hitting style?
I could come up with another 4 or five increasingly unlikely possibilities, each of which might reasonably have a different equivalent in French or any other language.
Speaking for myself, I often use it to refer to the number/range of words I am familiar with/am able to summon up easily. I suppose its meaning could be extended to refer to someone’s dexterity with a language.
+1 to this, also googling the phrase “word power” doesn’t bring up anything. Anyone else besides the OP heard of it and can describe the context in which it was used?
For me, the words “word power” bring to mind the perennial Readers’ Digest feature “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power” which was a vocabulary quiz (http://www.rd.com/word-power)
Vocabulaire.
I don’t know the phrase in English, either, other than the Reader’s Digest usage.
As a rule of thumb, idioms don’t translate.
“Word power” is an idiom. In other words, it’s a set of words that stands for an idea different from the plain meanings of the individual words strung together. In this particular case, it’s a fairly weak one, where the intended collective meaning is not too far from the plain meaning of the constituent words. But it’s also one seldom used in English.
When dealing with an idiom, it’s almost never appropriate to translate the words individually.
What is appropriate is determining accurately what the idiomatic meaning commonly is, which may well be different from how you personally use the phrase. Then search, or ask native speakers, for the phrase in their language with the same meaning.
Understand from the outset that there may be no idiomatic phrase in their language for the one you have in English. Yes, they will certainly be able to construct sentences to convey the gross meaning, but idioms are special, a shorthand larded with cultural meaning. French, or any other language, is under no obligation to have the same set of idioms English does. Heck, US & British English have very different sets of idiomatic meanings, and where they do both have a particular idiomatic meaning in common, they often use different idiomatic phrases = idioms between them for the same underlying meaning.
My favorite example from high school German class: In American English at the time, the idiom for an attractive young woman was “foxy chick”. The corresponding term in German, or so my textbook said, transliterated to English as “bright bee”. Neither small canids, baby birds, stinging insects, nor strong illumination have anything whatsoever to do with attractive women in any language. Nor would any of my high school friends in other classes have understood if I called one of the girls a “bright bee”. They’d just think I was weird / confused.
I guess “vocabulaire” will have to do. Nothing else comes up. Other languages have more interesting words I think. The Germans say “Wortschatz” (“word treasure”).