Pencils and crayons and political cartoons

I recently wanted to give a friend a gift of a packet of crayons. As she is an artist, I wanted to be sure that they were good ones, not the kind that kids use for scribbling with. I knew that Caran d’Ache was a quality brand so I bought those, but I also remembered my Russian master at school (ah, those were the days, when British schools actually taught modern languages) telling me that the Russian word for pencil was карандаш (karandash), and that it was connected with that brand name. Whether he actually said that the Russians had taken that name to be their word for pencil is more than I can remember after all this time, but I certainly assumed it to be the case – and why not when the Russian word for a railway station is vokzal, from Vauxhall in London?

But when I had bought my friend her present, I had a look at Caran d’Ache on Wikipedia. To my considerable surprise, I found that it was the other way around:

Caran d'Ache was the pseudonym of the 19th century French satirist and political cartoonist Emmanuel Poiré. "Caran d'Ache" comes from the Russian word karandash (карандаш), meaning pencil (of Turkic origin; "kara dash" meaning black stone). While his first work glorified the Napoleonic era, he went on to create "stories without words" and as a contributor to newspapers such as the Lundi du Figaro, he is sometimes hailed as one of the precursors of comic strips. The Swiss art products company Caran d'Ache is named after him.

Drawing "a family supper" from Caran d'Ache in le Figaro on February 14, 1898. The drawing depicts the divisions of French society during the Dreyfus Affair. At the top, somebody says "above all, let us not discuss the Dreyfus Affair!". At the bottom, the whole family is fighting, and the caption says "they have discussed it".

Comments

[Jolyon Kay]

What you saw was John, who happened to be crossing. So crossing is a participle, not a gerund. But the accident was caused by the crossing of the road, which happened to be done by John. So a gerund and needing a participle. The apostrophe helps you to distinguish between them in case of ambiguity, though I am not clever enough to invent an example.