Physiotherapy

The twenty-first entry is o torcicolo, and it is made of two Latin pieces an English reader already owns. The first is torquere, to twist, the verb behind « torsion », « contort », « tortuous » and « torment » — anything wrung out of the shape it had. The second is collum, the neck, which reached English through French as « collar » and sits inside « décolleté » as well. Joined, they give the neo-Latin torticollis, which says precisely what has happened: the neck is twisted. English has that compound too, spelled « torticollis », but it lives where a clinician writes and nowhere else, and somebody who used it across a kitchen table would be asked what he meant. What English reaches for instead names nothing anatomical at all — « a crick in the neck », built on an old word for a sudden catch. So the two languages sit at opposite ends of one scale. O torcicolo is ordinary Portuguese, said by anybody about two bad days; its exact English twin is a specialist’s term, and the everyday English is a noise.