[
korh] (n. m.) Paris has done some strange things with its
corpses.
In Roman times, the dead were buried in the suburbs but, in the 10th century, Christians decided they preferred their dead nearby and cemeteries were opened. Two hundred years later, a central burial ground was opened for the poorer Parisians, a dump site for
corpses without caskets. Problem was, all that decaying meat was threatening the city's water supply, which mostly came from wells. This went on merrily until 1786 when the city decided to exhume all those corpses and transfer them to underground tunnels once used for mining: the catacombs were born.
The English word
corpse is just a breath away from the French word
corps, which means
body—of which there are an estimated six million underneath Paris. In French, the word is pronounced with the
ps lobbed off, closer to the the Old French word
cors, less like the latin source
corpus.
