Are you an editor ou êtes-vous un monteur?

As a native Spanish speaker, I've always talked about "montaje", and I love that our language kept the French word instead of the English one. I find it odd and even awkward to describe the métier that I ended up falling in love with as "editing", when I must fill in a bio-filmography for some fund or catalogue. It probably has to do with the fact that "editing" so strongly implies discarding. Yes, there much dumping, weeding, slashing and shredding. Indeed you have much polishing to do by scraping shots, takes, minutes, seconds, frames, until truth shines unadulterated for a few moments or a few minutes. Tarkovsky even dismissed Eisenstein's juxtaposition ideas as ultimately dependent on the actual content of the shots (the "truth" in the sentence above). But one shot does not necessarily lead to another. Anything goes, really, in the cutting room (à la salle de montage, on dirait en Fran?ais ;) ). Therefore discarding or -as it is more often said- "cutting" is only part of the job, the part that is highlighted by the word "editor". So it was a pleasant surprise to watch this Hitchcock interview, and to hear the master's words: “We call it cutting, it isn't exactly that. Cutting implies severing something. It really should be called assembly. Mosaic is assembling something to create a whole”. Because that's what we really love, isn't it? To bring discreet units to common life, as simple atoms and molecules can become organic molecules and living organisms as they assemble into larger units. The same atoms and molecules can create entirely different tissues, organs and species. The same shot can combine with entirely different shots and produce entirely different results. Yes, we have to respect the "truth", the "inner force" in a shot, but there is not only one pre-defined outcome. That's why I love thinking about myself as a monteur or montajista rather than an editor. Does it happen to you too?