Look, expression, posture

Twelfth on this list stands corrugare la fronte, and the verb inside it is one an English reader recognises and then misplaces. « Corrugated » is alive and well in English, but it has left the body: it belongs to roofing sheets, to packaging, to the ridged cardboard a parcel is made of, and to anything with parallel furrows pressed into it. Nobody corrugates a forehead in ordinary speech, and « he corrugated his brow » reads either as a joke or as a nineteenth-century novel. Italian kept the verb where the face is. Corrugare la fronte is the plain daily way to say that somebody has pulled the skin above the eyes into folds; the same verb serves elsewhere on the body, as in corrugare il naso, and the fold itself is la ruga, the line a face keeps. So the trap runs one way only. Reading Italian, take corrugare as ordinary and unremarkable; writing English, reach for « to furrow », « to knit » or simply « to frown », and leave « corrugated » to the shed roof.