Epidemiology

The fourteenth entry is la distorsione da ricordo, and the last word in it draws a line English does not. « Memory » does two jobs at once. It is the faculty, the equipment: a good memory, a memory for faces, losing one’s memory. And it is a single thing brought back, one item among many: a childhood memory, my earliest memory, memories of a summer. Italian keeps the two in separate words and confuses them about as often as it confuses a hand with a finger. La memoria is the faculty and the store — avere buona memoria, imparare a memoria, la memoria del computer. Il ricordo is the one thing remembered, countable, and it is also the object that keeps it: the photograph on the shelf, what we call a keepsake. Un ricordo di famiglia, i ricordi di scuola. Hence the name of the bias, da ricordo and never da memoria. What fails in a case-control interview is not the patient’s equipment but the particular item the question pulls out, and Italian says which of the two it means before the sentence has begun.