Endocrinology

L’ormone della crescita is the growth hormone, and the word inside it is narrower than the English one it resembles. « Growth » does two jobs at once. It is the process — a child’s growth, the growth of a company, the growth of a crystal — and it is also a thing, a countable lump: a doctor who says he has found a growth means a mass, and the plural « growths » belongs to that second sense alone. Italian kept only the first job. La crescita is the process and nothing else: la crescita di un bambino, la crescita dell’economia, l’ormone della crescita. For the lump the language goes elsewhere — una massa, un nodulo, un’escrescenza — and this list supplies the precise name for one of them, l’adenoma. The trap is one-way and quiet. Reading Italian, nothing goes wrong. Writing it, somebody who renders « they found a growth » as hanno trovato una crescita has said that an increase was found, which is not what the sentence was for.