Genetics and inheritance

The fortieth entry is il pool genico, and it is the one place on this page where Italian hands an English word back to us with a different job attached. Il pool came in whole, kept its spelling, took a masculine article and refuses a plural of its own: i pool is the same word again. What changed is the range. For us « pool » begins with water, goes on to the car pool, the betting pool and the game with the coloured balls, and only well down the list reaches a pooling of resources. Italian kept that last sense alone and narrowed it further, until it means a team — a group of specialists brought together for one piece of work, and above all in a courthouse. Il pool antimafia, un pool di magistrati, un pool di avvocati are ordinary newspaper Italian, and no English newspaper would call any of them a pool. The swimming one is not available at all, because that is la piscina. So il pool genico is the exception rather than the rule: here the technical sense has come home unchanged.