Lexicography

The twentieth entry is le tableau de flexion, and the noun at the end of it is one English long ago cut in two. French keeps a single la flexion for every kind of bending. It is the bending of a joint — la flexion du genou, la flexion du coude — and it is equally the bending of a word into its forms, which is what a dictionary prints in a table. English took the Latin flectere twice over and gave each borrowing one job. « Flexion » belongs to anatomy and to physiotherapy, where it is paired with « extension » and names a joint closing. « Inflection » belongs to grammar, and names exactly what le tableau de flexion sets out: the endings a verb or a noun runs through. Neither will stand in for the other. A table of flexion, written in English, puts a knee on the page where a paradigm was meant to be; and an inflection, said of a physiotherapist’s measurement, sounds like a rise in the voice, the other job the grammatical word does. Render this entry as an inflection table, and leave « flexion » to the body.