The nervous system and neurology

The thirty-fifth entry is la paralysie, and English holds that word twice over, arrived by two roads and no longer interchangeable. « Paralysis » came late, copied out of Greek through Latin by people reading books, and it kept its shape. « Palsy » is the identical word worn down in the mouth: Old French paralisie became parlesie on this side of the Channel and then « palsy », four syllables ground down to two, and it was at work in English long before the learned form arrived. For a while the two were spellings of one thing. Then medicine sorted them, and each took its own ground. « Paralysis » is the general word for a loss of movement, the one a report uses. « Palsy » survives almost only in the names of particular conditions: « cerebral palsy », « Bell’s palsy », and « the shaking palsy », which is what Parkinson described. French kept the learned form and nothing else, so la paralysie does both jobs and the translator must choose. La paralysie cérébrale is « cerebral palsy », never « cerebral paralysis »; la paralysie du bras droit is paralysis and nothing else.