Adjectives of evidential weight in Italian

The eighth entry is capillare, and it is the adjective on this list an English reader is likeliest to misread, because the word exists in English and has stayed where Italian did not. « Capillary » is anatomy and physics: the smallest blood vessels, and the rise of water in a narrow tube. Both languages start from capillus, a hair, and from capillaris, hair-thin. Italian kept that sense too, since i vasi capillari are the same vessels, but it also let the picture work as a metaphor, and that is where the two part. A network so fine that it reaches every last point is capillare: una rete capillare, una distribuzione capillare, and here una verifica capillare, a check that has gone into every branch and left nothing out. « A capillary check » says nothing at all in English; the words for it are « exhaustive », « thorough », « far-reaching ». Read capillare as merely fine and you are left holding the size of the vessels, having lost the whole point, which is that nothing was missed.