Hospital and diagnosis

One adjective in this list looks harmless to an English reader and is among the most loaded words on the page. Évolutif is built on l’évolution, and neither of them carries the English sense of species changing over long ages. In a French letter une maladie évolutive is a disease that is advancing, and l’évolution de la maladie is simply its course — which is why évolution favorable is good news and évolution défavorable is not. The word states a direction, and in a clinical report that direction is usually the point of the sentence. « Evolving » is the wrong translation, because it suggests change without saying which way; « evolutive » sits in dictionaries and is used by almost nobody. What a doctor writes in English is « progressive », and for the noun « the course » or « the progression », never « the evolution ». And the same adjective is a selling point away from the ward: un poste évolutif is a job with room to grow in it, un tarif évolutif a price that can be revised. One word: a promise in a job advert, a warning in a letter.