Corrosion and material failure

The fourth entry is la passivation, and the word is far less technical than it looks. Underneath it lies the Latin verb pati, passus sum, which meant to undergo, to be on the receiving end of whatever happens. From it came the adjective passivus, which French made into passif and then, in the language of the laboratory, into la passivation — the state of a metal that has stopped reacting, a surface to which things are done and which does nothing back. English holds three familiar words from that same verb and keeps them in three different rooms. « A patient » is patiens, the one undergoing, which is why one word names both a sick person and the virtue of putting up with things. « Passion » is passio, an undergoing of suffering, and it named the Crucifixion for centuries before it ever named enthusiasm. And the passive voice is the grammar of a subject that acts not at all. Put the three side by side and the metallurgy explains itself: a passivated steel is a patient steel. Nothing has been added to it. It is safe because it has nothing left to give.