In search of lost/spare/wasted time
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As the English Wikipedia article tells us, the first English translation of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu bore the title Remembrance of Things Past, echoing Shakespeare's Sonnet 30, while later translations used the more literal In search of lost time. But Proust's original title also echoes two idiomatic phases in French, one of which is entirely missing in English, while the other one is weaker– and I've wondered for a while how intentional those echoes were.
For the first one, see Wiktionnaire's entry for "à temps perdu", with the gloss "En dehors de ses heures de travail rémunérées" ("Outside of paid working hours"). WordReference glosses "à temps perdu" as "in your spare time". For a real world example, see for example this Le Matin headline "L’infirmière vend du Harry Potter à temps perdu", which translates as "The nurse sells Harry Potter in her spare time".
And this is not a recent coinage — there are plenty of pre-Proust examples, for instance in this 1885 Histoire du socialisme.
These spare time/free time meanings are entirely missing from the English phrase "lost time".
For the second possible Proustian ambiguity, see Wiktionnaire's entry for the phrase "c'est du temps perdu", glossed as "Se dit en parlant des choses pour lesquelles on emploie inutilement du temps, de la peine, soit parce qu’elles ne le méritent pas, soit parce qu’elles ne doivent pas réussir" ("This is said when speaking of things for which one spends time and effort unnecessarily, either because they do not deserve it, or because they are not likely to succeed.").
The cited example is Jean-Paul Sartre's play Les main sales: "Ils veulent me faire parler, mais avec moi c’est du temps perdu", which translates as "They want to make me talk, but with me it's a waste of time".
More of the context (from here):
And a real-world headline: "Ces points de PIB qui s'envolent à cause du temps perdu à scroller sur les écrans" ("These GDP points that are disappearing because of the time wasted scrolling on screens"). Or this one: "Que de temps perdu sur nos téléphones !" ("How much time we waste on our phones!").
There's a famous proverb from Poor Richard's Almanack that is consistent with this sense, "Lost time is never found again". And it's common to talk or write about certain ways to waste time as ways to "lose time", for example in the headline "Healthcare Organizations Are Stuck in Crisis Mode as Clinicians Lose Time to Administrative Work".
But whether the reasons are dull chores or pleasant diversions, I think that spending time and effort unnecessarily is more commonly expressed in English as waste/wasting/wasted time than lose/losing/lost time.
Brian said,
November 29, 2025 @ 9:24 pm
True, although "time lost" does come closer in meaning to "wasted time", at least to my ear. Perhaps "In Search of Time Lost" would thus be a better translation….
Michael Vnuk said,
November 30, 2025 @ 6:07 am
A property firm here in Australia advertises that using its services will 'save you time, money and stress.' Hmm, the time and money I save can be put to good use on other projects or investments, but what will I do with the saved stress?
Philip Taylor said,
November 30, 2025 @ 8:58 am
Well, much the same as you would do with the pain saved by having a tooth abscess treated in a timely manner, Michael, or even the pain saved by using any of the widely advertised painsaving domestic appliances …
r-bryan said,
November 30, 2025 @ 6:29 pm
In Shakespeare's Sonnet 106, "When in the chronicle of wasted time" the time was neither lost nor spare, nor was it spent in profitless idleness. The best I can come up with after 2.5 minutes of assiduous internet research is that here "wasted" means something like "irrevocably passed by". I hope someone can set me straight.
J.W. Brewer said,
December 1, 2025 @ 7:58 am
I don't know French but am familiar with "perdu" in the non-Proustian phrase "pain perdu," which is the French name (occasionally used in English) for the dish standardly called "French toast" in AmEng. At some point when I was an undergraduate I picked up the etymological trivia that French "perdu" descends from the same Latin etymon as English "perdition," and then (perhaps in a breakfast-time dining-hall conversation) was led to believe that pain perdu literally meant bread that had been damned or condemned or destroyed, which seemed a rather striking culinary image/metaphor for breakfast time. I have subsequently come to suspect that I may have been misinformed, and that my perhaps-overconfident interlocutor was not allowing for the possibility that the French verb "perdre" does not carry (or at least does not obligatorily carry) the stronger sense of the Latin verb "perdere" that is glossed in English as "destroy, ruin, wreck" etc.
Robert Coren said,
December 1, 2025 @ 10:01 am
Well, the idea of what we call "perdition" may be a little strong, I think the underlying idea is correct: That this is a way of making good use of bread that, having gone stale, is not suitable for its original purpose.
Jonathan Smith said,
December 1, 2025 @ 5:14 pm
Re: "c'est du temps perdu" I was thinking left over, which also could apply to J.W. Brewer's toast… not sure if "In Search of Leftover Time" is poetic or garbage however.
Tom said,
December 3, 2025 @ 4:34 pm
I don't speak French, but , considering the content of the novel, I'm guessing that perdu does contain some of the nuance of condemned and that Proust intended this nuance when he chose his title.