Geriatrics

Le potentiel de récupération is the rehabilitation potential, and the noun inside it belongs to a verb far larger in French than its English lookalike. « Recuperate » is narrow, formal and medical: a person recuperates after an illness, and that is very nearly the whole of it. It takes no object either — nobody in English recuperates a set of keys. Récupérer is one of the workhorses of everyday French, and objects are exactly what it takes. J’ai récupéré mes clés is I got my keys back. Je te récupère à la gare is I will pick you up at the station. Du bois de récupération is salvaged timber, and faire de la récup is the whole business of building things out of what other people threw away. La récupération politique d’un mouvement is a party helping itself to somebody else’s cause, for which English has to reach for « co-opt » or « hijack ». The two words meet in one place only, il récupère vite après l’effort — which is the sense this list needs, and the reason a reader never notices the rest of the verb.