At the pharmacy

The thirteenth entry is il placebo, a word both languages took whole and neither invented. It is Latin, and it is a verb: placebo, I shall please, the future of placere. It came down to us through the liturgy. The Vulgate psalm reads placebo Domino in regione vivorum, I shall please the Lord in the land of the living, and that verse opened Vespers in the Office of the Dead, so the service itself became known as the Placebo. Mourners who turned up out of duty rather than grief were said « to sing placebo », and by the fourteenth century the phrase had settled into English as a name for flattery: a courtier who told you what you wished to hear was a placebo. Medicine borrowed the insult only around 1800, for a preparation given to please a patient rather than to treat him. So un gruppo riceve il placebo hides a joke about courtiers under a clinical surface — and note that the word has never once meant an inert substance. It names the intention behind the giving.