The beach and the seaside holiday

Halfway down the list sits la medusa, and the name is a piece of mythology that English owns and never uses. In Italian this is the plain, everyday word: arrivano le meduse is what a bather says to another bather, exactly where an English speaker says « jellyfish ». The word is a proper name, Medusa, the Gorgon of Greek myth whose hair was a nest of snakes — and whoever first looked down into the water at that fringe of trailing tentacles saw the head. English took the same name and did something narrow with it. « Medusa » survives only as a technical term: the free-swimming, bell-shaped form of a cnidarian, set against the « polyp », the stalked form fastened to a rock. So one creature is a medusa in a scientific paper and a jellyfish on a beach. Italian has no second, homelier word to fall back on; la medusa does both jobs at once. Two things follow. Translate la medusa as « jellyfish », never as « medusa ». And learn the plural, le meduse, because that is the form the notice at the kiosk will use.