The nervous system and neurology

L’ippocampo was an animal long before it was a ridge of tissue. The Greek hippokampos names the sea horse, and its first half is hippos, a horse — the same hippos that stands at the front of « hippopotamus », the river horse. The second half named a monster of the sea, so the whole word says horse of the sea, which is exactly what « seahorse » says in plain English, a word at a time. When anatomists needed a name for the curved fold on the floor of each temporal lobe, they took the Greek and not the translation, and from that moment English had two words where Greek had one: the creature in the rock pool is a « seahorse », the structure in the scan is a « hippocampus ». Italian never split them. L’ippocampo serves for both, so an aquarium label and a neurology report use the same noun, and the sentence around it does all the work of telling them apart. Reading l’ippocampo aiuta a fissare i ricordi nuovi, remember that the word is also swimming in a tank somewhere.