Emergency medical services

Two thirds of the way down this list stands l’intoxication, and it is the one entry an English reader will misread with complete confidence. In French the word means poisoning and nothing else: une intoxication alimentaire is food poisoning, une intoxication au monoxyde de carbone is what a faulty boiler does to a sleeping household, and s’intoxiquer is to be poisoned by something swallowed or breathed in. « Intoxication » in English went somewhere quite different. On a police form or in a hospital note it reports drinking, and « intoxicated » describes somebody who has had too much, not somebody who has taken a poison. Both words rest on Latin toxicum, poison, and it is the French one that stayed where it started. The consequence is worth having in advance, because it arrives in a sentence nobody will repeat twice: when a French crew reports une intoxication, the subject is a substance, and the English that carries it is « poisoning ». Where French does mean drunk it says en état d’ébriété, and the poison word plays no part in it.