Veterinary medicine in French

Twenty-sixth in the list is le changement de pansement, and the noun inside it hides one of the tidiest accidents in the French dictionary. Panser, to dress a wound, and penser, to think, are not two verbs that happen to sound alike. They are one verb, and the spelling that keeps them apart was settled long after the senses had drifted, which is why the older language wrote either form for either job. The bridge between them is penser à quelqu’un, which in earlier French meant giving somebody your attention in the practical sense — that is, looking after them. From there the verb went into the stable, where panser un cheval still means to groom a horse and not to bandage it, and then into medicine, where panser une plaie is to clean a wound and cover it. So le pansement is, at the bottom, an act of attention. English built its own word out of cloth instead: to dress a wound is to clothe it, and a « dressing » is the same word as the one for getting dressed in the morning. One language remembers the thought and the other the covering.