Physiotherapy

L’escursione articolare stands fifth, and the middle word is a trap that English sets for itself. « Excursion » in everyday English means an outing, a trip with a return ticket, and Italian does use l’escursione that way as well: un’escursione in montagna is a day’s walk in the hills. What surprises is how ordinary the other sense is. L’escursione also names the distance between the lowest and the highest point something reaches — l’escursione termica is the spread between the night reading and the afternoon one, l’escursione di marea the difference between low water and high water — and on this page it is how far a joint travels before it stops. English has not quite lost that second sense, but it has pushed it into corners where few people meet it: a clinician measures chest excursion, an engineer the excursion of a piston. So one word sits in the middle of ordinary Italian technical speech while its English twin sounds either like a school trip or like a specialist’s term, with nothing in between. When escursione is not about walking, it is about how much room something has.