Transplant medicine

The seventeenth entry is lo xenotrapianto, and the first half of the word is a Greek noun that English has borrowed several times over without ever translating it. Xenos named the stranger and the guest with one word, because those were two ends of a single relation: the man at the door was owed hospitality precisely because he came from elsewhere. English kept only the stranger. « Xenophobia » is fear of foreigners and could never be said of a guest. « Xenon » was named the strange one, because it was found in what was left of the air after everything already known had been taken out. And « xenolith », in geology, is a lump of rock that the rock around it did not make and has merely closed over — which is the picture in lo xenotrapianto exactly: living tissue from another species, set inside a body that did not grow it. One thing more. Il trapianto covers the operation and the thing moved alike, while English divides that work between « transplantation » for the procedure and « graft » for the tissue itself.