Librarianship in Italian

The seventh entry is l’accordo di fornitura continuativa, and the first noun is a false friend of an unusual kind: not one that means something else, but one that lives at a different height. English has « accord », and it is close to a museum piece. It survives in « of one’s own accord », in « in accord with », and in the names of treaties — the Helsinki Accords, the Oslo Accords — and almost nowhere else. L’accordo, by contrast, is the ordinary Italian word for a bargain of any size. Abbiamo trovato un accordo is how two people say they have settled something; l’accordo quadro is a framework agreement; l’accordo sindacale is a collective agreement. The phrase built on it is commoner still: essere d’accordo is to agree, mettersi d’accordo is to arrange something between yourselves, and a bare d’accordo is simply « all right ». So the words to reach for are « agreement », « deal » and « arrangement », and the one to leave alone is the one that looks identical. A cognate can mislead by being too grand quite as easily as by meaning the wrong thing.