Microbiology

The twentieth entry is la percezione del quorum, and the word that Italian and English borrowed whole was never a noun in the language it came from. Quorum is the genitive plural of the Latin relative qui, and it means simply « of whom ». It survives because it opened a clause in the commissions that appointed justices of the peace, naming the men « of whom » a stated number had to be present before anything could be done. The clause went; the pronoun stayed, hardened into a thing, and now a committee has a quorum, reaches one, or fails to. Italian took the same fossil and handles it as freely — raggiungere il quorum, il quorum non è stato raggiunto, senza il quorum non si vota — and it is masculine and never inflected, because a genitive plural has nowhere left to go. What makes it worth stopping on here is the picture underneath: each bacterium releases a signal, each one adds to what is already there, and when the concentration says that enough of them are present, they begin to act together. The committee word is exact. They are counting themselves before anybody speaks.