Martine Aubry wins by a hair (or a whisker).

(This picture of Martine Aubry is from Liberation)

We’ve been hearing the idiom ‘d’un cheveu’ in the French news lately, so I decided to translate Yvan Amar’s explanation of it from his Les Mots de la Semaine column on Radio France:

In France they’ve been voting to elect the head of the Socialist Party. Of course, not everyone has voted, only the members of the party. And Martine Aubry has come first by a whisker (in French the idiom is ‘d’un cheveu’: by one hair). This is one of those expressions we hear often, and Abdalla Hamlaoui asked us what it means, and especially how it can be explained.

Everyone understands its meaning: Martine Aubrey had more votes than Segolene Royal, but very few! The difference was minimal, miniscule. So, we know that a hair is very fine, and often we use this word to express something which is so small as to be almost nothing.

But there is another reason for using this word. We say sometimes that one competitor has won by a head. This means that they have won by very little. So, one hair is even less than one head, but we are still using the same type of image because the hair is on the head. We also say quite often a ‘short head’, if we want to add that it’s only a little difference, or we might even say a ‘very short head’. And sometimes we keep only the adjective, as in a ‘short victory’, or a ‘very short victory’.