Toxicology in Italian

The twenty-second entry is il valore limite di esposizione professionale, and its last word is a trap laid for readers of English and for nobody else. Professionale is built on la professione in the wide sense of the work a person does for a living, so una malattia professionale is an occupational disease, un infortunio professionale an accident at work, and l’esposizione professionale whatever a worker takes in on the job — at a laboratory bench, in a paint shop, on a farm. Nothing in the word grades anybody. « Professional » in English drifted the other way and now carries a judgement about training and standards, so « a professional exposure limit » would read as a limit set by experts rather than a limit protecting the people exposed. The settled term is « occupational exposure limit », and the whole Italian phrase comes out as « occupational exposure limit value ». What makes the slip easy to miss is that French, Spanish and Portuguese all kept the wide sense here: only English narrowed it.