Palaeontology

One word on this list means one thing in an orchard and another in a museum drawer. To a botanist der Steinkern is the hard stone inside a cherry, a plum or an olive, the woody shell around the seed that gives die Steinfrucht its name. To a palaeontologist it is the sediment that seeped into a shell after the soft body had decayed and then hardened, so that the object on the table is a filling of the cavity rather than the shell itself. The two senses sit side by side in the dictionary and a German reader separates them by the room they are in. The distinction matters for the reading: ein Steinkern shows the inner surface, with the scars where the muscles were attached, and says nothing about the ribs and knots on the outside. Those survive, if at all, as an impression in the surrounding rock.