Gender equality

French fact. (Best look away now unless you like details about grammar.) As you probably know, French has masculine and feminine nouns. You have to make all your adjectives (and for other reasons sometimes your verb endings) agree in order to create sentences with harmony of the sexes. There is rhyme and reason to how you go about doing this, but not always. Why, for example, do you write 'la petite fille' for granddaughter, with an 'e' added to 'petit' to make everything agree, but do you leave 'la grand mere' without an 'e'? In fact, grande-mere means 'tall mother' not grandmother. Turns out 'grandmere' is a verbal relic, a hangover from the candlelit days of medieval French, when words stuck close to their Latin ancestors. And in Latin there was a group of adjectives (in the third declension if you must know) that don't make all the genders match up. Grand's great-great-great-[repeat as necessary] grandmother's etymological ancestor came from this set of nonconformist adjectives. So there you go. Spread the word. Go on, do.