Ophthalmology

This list ends on socchiudere gli occhi and, a dozen lines earlier, carries lo strabismo. In English those two are one word. « To squint » is what you do to a sign in the distance, narrowing the eyes against the light or the blur; « a squint » is the condition in which one eye does not point where the other one does, as in « she has a squint in her left eye ». One verb, one noun, the same five letters, and nothing in the language marks the join. Italian keeps them apart absolutely. The condition is lo strabismo, the person is strabico, and the pair belongs to the consulting room; the gesture is socchiudere gli occhi, or strizzare gli occhi, and it belongs to ordinary life. Nothing links the two families, not a root and not a sound. That matters most when translating out of English, because « the child squints » can be either sentence and only the situation decides which. Note too that the medical sense is the everyday word in British English, where a reader might have expected « strabismus » — that one stays in the textbook.