Health and medicine

Two entries in the middle of the list, la lesione and lesionare, look as though English already owned them, and it owns one corner. A « lesion » in English is a patch of damaged tissue seen by a clinician; it lives in a report, a scan or a textbook, and nowhere else. Italian uses the same noun for the whole idea of damage. La lesione si chiude da sola is an ordinary cut healing over. Una lesione muscolare is a torn muscle, the thing that keeps a footballer off the pitch. Le lesioni nel muro are cracks in the brickwork, with no body involved at all. And le lesioni personali is a criminal charge, bodily harm, which is why the word turns up in a courtroom as readily as in a clinic. Where Italian has one noun, English needs « wound », « injury », « tear », « crack » and « harm », and reaches for « lesion » only in the narrowest of them. The root is not foreign, though: Latin laedere, to hurt, sits inside « collision », where two things damage each other and nobody thinks of a clinic.