The gym and training

Near the end of the list stands indolenzito, the word for the day after a hard session, and a reader who trusts the shape of it will get it exactly backwards. Both indolenzito and « indolent » are built on Latin dolere, to hurt, and both open with in-. But those are two different prefixes wearing the same two letters. In « indolent » the in- is the one that denies: Latin indolens meant feeling no pain, and the word came into English as a medical term, so that an « indolent » ulcer is one that does not hurt — a sense doctors still write. From painless it slid to untroubled, and from untroubled to unwilling to be troubled, which is the meaning every dictionary now gives first. The Italian in- is the other one, the one that carries something inwards: indolenzire is to put soreness into a muscle, and indolenzito is what the muscle then is. So the word that looks like « lazy » describes somebody who trained yesterday, and the word that once meant painless describes somebody who did not.