Transplant medicine

The eighteenth entry is le pont vers la greffe, and here the bridge is exactly the one an English clinician builds: a pump or a machine that keeps a patient alive until an organ arrives. The noun is harmless, and the trouble starts only when it leaves the ward and turns up in a saying that English appears to share. Il est passé beaucoup d’eau sous les ponts does not announce that an old quarrel has been forgotten. It says that a great deal of time has gone by and that things have changed in the meantime: depuis notre dernière rencontre, il est passé de l’eau sous les ponts is how two people who have not met for years begin to catch up. « Water under the bridge » looks at the same river and draws another conclusion: what happened no longer matters, so let it go. Translate one by the other and a remark about the passing years turns into an offer of forgiveness that nobody made. The bridge has one more life in French: dormir sous les ponts is to sleep rough, with nothing overhead but the arch.