Work and job applications

The twenty-seventh entry is il tirocinio, the traineeship, and it is the only word on this page that began in an army camp. Latin tiro was a raw recruit, a soldier in his first year who had been handed a shield and had not yet used it, and tirocinium was that first stretch of service, the months during which he was still being made into a soldier. The word then left the camp for every other trade, so that a Latin writer could speak of the tirocinium of an orator or a poet, and it is that widened sense which Italian inherited whole: un tirocinio di tre mesi is a spell of supervised work, and il tirocinante is the person serving it. English took the same tiro and kept it small. It survives as « tyro », a beginner, a word most readers have met in print and never once said aloud, which means an English speaker owns the root of tirocinio without owning the thing. For the thing itself English reaches instead for « traineeship », « placement » and « work experience », three expressions with no soldier anywhere inside them.