Palaeontology in Italian

The tenth entry is pietrificato, and it is the word on this list an English reader will translate correctly and still misuse. Il tronco pietrificato is a trunk whose wood has been replaced by mineral, exactly as the entry says, and in Italian that is the first and ordinary job of pietrificare. « Petrified » has moved almost entirely off the rock. Standing alone it means frightened past the point of moving — « I was petrified », « petrified of flying » — and nobody hearing it thinks of stone at all. The literal sense survives only where a noun props it up: « petrified wood », « a petrified forest », and very little else. The picture underneath is the same in both languages, because both words are built on petra, the stone, which Latin had taken from Greek: a body that cannot move because it has become mineral. Italian took the frightened sense too, but it handed it to a second word, impietrito. È rimasto impietrito is said of somebody frozen by shock, and it is never said of a fossil. One root, two verbs, and the fright kept off the specimen.