Anaesthesia

Entry nineteen is graduare, and an English reader reaches for « to graduate » without stopping. The two verbs do share a parent, the Latin gradus, a step, and there they separate. Italian kept the step itself: graduare is to move something up or down in small increments until it sits where it should, which is why a thermometer, a syringe and a lens are all graduati, marked off step by step. English handed the word to a person instead, so somebody who has climbed the last step of a degree « graduates », and nothing gradual is left in it. Il farmaco si gradua fino all’effetto voluto therefore says that the drug is titrated — raised a little, watched, raised again — and says nothing about anybody finishing a course. For that, Italian uses a different verb altogether, laurearsi, with il laureato for the graduate. Hold « gradual » and « graduated cylinder » in mind rather than « graduation », and the Italian verb lands in the right place at once.