Evolution

The twenty-second entry is l’organo vestigiale, and the adjective is far more literal than it looks. Behind it stands Latin vestigium, which did not mean a leftover or a ruin. It meant the sole of the foot, and then the print that sole presses into soft ground. A vestigial organ is therefore not first of all a spare part that nobody removed. It is a footprint: the mark an earlier use pressed into the body before walking away from it, which describes what the term actually names far better than any word built on « remnant » does. English keeps the same root in a place where nobody looks for it. To « investigate » is investigare, to follow the footprints, to track — so the detective and the vestigial organ are doing one job from opposite ends, the one reading the print forwards and the other backwards. Italian has both words as well, vestigiale and investigare, and it keeps besides the plural le vestigia for what is left standing of a building or a city: the one place where the footprint has turned into masonry.