Nephrology in Italian

The twenty-first entry is rene del donatore, and the noun behind it does something English has no way of copying. Il rene is the organ, and its ordinary masculine plural is i reni: i reni filtrano il sangue, la biopsia dei reni. But the same word carries a second plural, feminine, le reni, and that one is not the organs at all. Le reni are the small of the back, the loins, the place a person puts a hand on after lifting something badly. Ho mal di reni is backache and nothing else, and spezzare le reni a qualcuno is to break somebody’s resistance, an image built on a back rather than on a filter. So the article carries the entire difference: i renibelong to the nephrologistle renibelong to everyday complaint English has no such device anywhere. « Kidneys » are the organs, always and only, and for the region we reach for something unrelated, « the small of the back » or « the loins ». The rule for reading an Italian note is therefore short: when the plural turns feminine, nobody is talking about filtration any more.