At the doctor’s and in hospital

The words of a health service. Near the end sits la pénurie de personnel, and both languages have the Latin penuria, a lack of something. English narrowed it to one lack: « penury » is having no money, « living in penury » is said of a person, and nobody would use it of a staff rota. French kept the old breadth and uses it of anything that has run short: une pénurie de personnel, une pénurie de vaccins, une pénurie de médecins, une pénurie d’essence. The English word for all of those is the plain « shortage », which looks nothing like it, while the word that does look like it has drifted into a different subject entirely. So a French headline about unfilled posts reads, to somebody who trusts the cognate, as a headline about poverty — and the two are not the same story.