Banking supervision

The twenty-third entry is l’unione bancaria, and the noun inside it has a relative on the vegetable shelf. Latin unio was built on unus, one, and meant oneness; Roman writers also used it for the bulb that grows as a single ball instead of splitting into cloves the way garlic does. The learned sense travelled through Old French into English as « union », the kitchen sense came through Norman French as « onion », and the two have sat side by side for centuries without anybody noticing they are the same word. Italian took only the first of them: l’unione is the joining, and the vegetable is la cipolla, from another Latin word altogether, cepulla. There is a trap running the other way too. An English reader who meets l’unione may hear a trade union in it, because in Britain « the union » usually means the body that bargains over wages. Italian never uses the word that way: that body is il sindacato, and l’unione stays with states, banks and marriages.