Toxicology

El órgano diana no siempre es donde entra el tóxico: the target organ is not always where the poison goes in. La diana is the bullseye — the painted circle a dart or an arrow is aimed at — and from there it became the target of a drug or a poison, exactly as « target » did for us. But the Spanish word has a second life English has no part in: tocar diana is to sound reveille, the bugle call that gets a barracks out of bed, and a las seis, diana on an army timetable means six o'clock, everybody up. Bullseye and reveille in one noun — and the link is the older sense, the first light of day, from the goddess of the moon giving way to it.