Feelings and character in French

One adjective in this list will be read with complete confidence and completely wrong. Je suis énervé par ce bruit says the noise has wound the speaker up: agitated, on edge, short-tempered. The English word « enervated » says the opposite — drained of energy, limp, without the strength to be annoyed about anything. Both come from the same Latin nerve, and each language took the picture in a different direction: French read it as nerves stripped bare and therefore raw, English as sinews cut and therefore weak. The everyday French word is very common and quite mild — ça m’énerve is closer to « that is annoying » than to anger — while the English one is rare and literary. Two words that look identical, one hot and one cold, and neither translates the other.