>That ordinateur, aeroglisseur (hovercraft) business is surely l'Academie Francaise just trying to preserve the sovereignty of their language and stop english words from creeping in?

They aren't the only ones. Hungarian Academy stepped in, Slovenia is also doing fine, and Croatia is of course composing new terms on a regular basis to everybody's amusement.

Some of these terms (in all the languages mentioned) are really nice. For example, the Hungarian term for help is "sugó" (pron. shugaw) - the prompter, as in theatre. They did have a few flops - calling a directory "könyvtár" (book warehouse, i.e. library) got them into trouble when they came to word "library"... or, the collation sequence was the nasty bit, because some consonant triplets in composite words would have to sort differently, depending on whether they were split 2-1 or 1-2 between the first and second part of the word. Can't think of an example, though.

Slovenia at least calls directory "mapa" (map), which has "folder" as its second meaning, so they at least don't have that problem.

Serbian terms for lookup and transactional tables are probably impossible to translate into English, but they describe their nature much better. Sometimes I turn on one of these languages in any software which has reloadable resource files, and it does turn out a few nice surprises. And a few funny ones, of course. For example, the proposed Croatian term for hard disk was "čvrsnik" - retranslatable as "hardnick", which immediately had sexual connotations.