Oncology

The thirtieth entry is la progression de la maladie, and the last noun is a false friend of the kind that costs nothing in comprehension and everything in tone. English owns the same word. « Malady » came over from French in the Middle Ages and never left, but it retreated into verse and irony, so that today it names a spiritual affliction or a joke rather than an illness, and nobody describes a malady to a doctor. French did the opposite and put la maladie at the centre of ordinary speech: une maladie de peau, être en arrêt maladie, l’assurance maladie, la maladie de Parkinson. It is the word a child uses. The plain English for it is « illness » or « disease », and a translation on this page has to reach for one of those, because « malady » would put a clinical report into a poem. The noun underneath behaves the same way. Le mal is evil in a sermon, but in a waiting room it is pain, as in j’ai mal au dos, and in avoir du mal à faire quelque chose it is nothing worse than difficulty.