Applying and the interview

The thirty-third entry is il successo, and the noun is the safe half of a word whose other half catches out every English reader. Italian succedere still carries the plain Latin sense of coming after, and out of it grew the commonest question in the language: cos’è successo?, what has happened. Nothing in that sentence is going well. È successo un guaio reports a mess, and mi è successo ieri merely dates an event. The good sense lives in the noun and nowhere else: il successo del corso is a triumph, while the same form standing after essere announces that something occurred, and no more than that. English made the opposite arrangement. It kept the neutral sense in the relatives — « succession », « successive », a monarch who succeeds to a throne — and let the everyday verb « to succeed » and the noun « success » narrow to good fortune alone, so that « it succeeded » can no longer mean « it came next ». The working rule is short: as a noun the word is a triumph, as a participle it is only news.