Doctor and chemist

The list for a visit nobody plans, and it holds one word that splits in a way English never does. La radio is the radio set — j’écoute la radio le matin — and it is also the X-ray, because it is short for la radiographie. So le médecin regarde la radio is a doctor looking at a plate, not at a wireless. The two senses share a root, radius, the ray: one is the ray broadcast through the air, the other the ray sent through a body. English kept the first and named the second after the letter Röntgen used for something he could not identify, so nothing in « X-ray » points back to « radio » at all. The giveaway is the verb: you listen to one and you look at the other, and French lets the sentence decide.