Words: shebang, n.

SOME NEW French movies tour the country and, if none recalls the Truffaut era, this human behaviour leavens the SFX fodder of the multiplexes - and has one boggling at the subtitlers' efforts.

In The New Eve grapes are visible but, in English, they remain raisins. Perhaps the best movie is Calf Moon. Somewhere between Best Boy and The Dream Team, it tells of a country family and a cow doted upon by a retarded son. Events prompt a subtitle "the whole shebang". This sounds of French origin, but there is a hint of Irish. In the 1870s Bret Harte wrote of hiring "the whole shebang", a vehicle, which suggests charabanc , but it already meant one's home in American slang, perhaps from the Irish shebeen, for tavern, which is another meaning of shebang.