Orthopaedics and trauma surgery in French

The eighth entry is le syndrome des loges, and English needs a different noun for every room that French calls by this single name. Une loge at the opera is a box, the small balcony for four with its own door. La loge du concierge is the porter’s lodge, the flat beside the street door of a block, and the freemasons meet in une loge too. Backstage, la loge is the dressing room, and an actor waits dans sa loge. Anatomy then took the same word for a fourth kind of enclosed space: the sheath of fascia that holds one group of muscles together, which English calls a compartment. Hence this entry, where the pressure inside such a sheath rises until the blood can no longer get through, and hence « compartment syndrome », the only accepted English name for it. There is no one word to reach for, so the room decides the translation: box, lodge, dressing room or compartment, and only the last of the four belongs in a hospital.