Geriatrics

The sixth entry is la sarcopenia, and it is made of two Greek pieces that English already owns without noticing. The first is sárx, in the genitive sarkós, flesh. It sits inside « sarcophagus », the stone that was believed to eat the flesh of the body laid in it, and inside « sarcasm », from sarkázein, to tear the flesh — a remark that strips a person the way a dog strips a bone. Nobody reaching for either word thinks of meat, and that is the point: the piece survives, the picture does not. The second half is penía, want or poverty, the same element the laboratory uses in « leukopenia » and « thrombocytopenia », each naming a shortage rather than a disease. Put together, la sarcopenia says a poverty of flesh. That is exactly what the condition is, and it is what no ordinary English phrase manages: « muscle wasting » names the process, « muscle loss » names the arithmetic, and neither keeps the older and bleaker image of a body grown poor in its own substance.