Orthopaedics and trauma surgery in Italian

The sixteenth entry is l’ernia discale, and the everyday English for it is a phrase that describes something which does not happen. « A slipped disc » is what a patient says, what a newspaper prints and what a colleague asks about, and the disc has slipped nowhere: it stays where it has always been while its soft centre is pushed out through a tear in the ring around it and presses on a nerve root. The clinical English is « a herniated disc » or « a prolapsed disc », and both of those say what the picture shows. Italian has no equivalent of the slipping at all. L’ernia discale in writing and l’ernia del disco in speech both name a hernia, exactly as l’ernia inguinale does, and the family stays open around it — erniato, l’erniazione, il disco erniato. There is a trap in the other direction too: « hernia » on its own, in English, is heard as the one in the groin or the abdomen, so nobody describes a spine that way without keeping the adjective.