School, university, training

Twenty-first on this list is l’imbroglio, and English owns the word too, which is exactly the difficulty. In English « an imbroglio » is a situation: a confused, entangled, faintly embarrassing affair, usually political — a diplomatic imbroglio, a legal one. Nobody in it is necessarily lying; it is a mess with too many threads. In Italian the noun has moved off the situation and onto the person. Un imbroglio is a deception, a swindle, a fiddle; imbrogliare is to cheat somebody, and un imbroglione is a cheat. So l’imbroglio è punito dal regolamento, the sentence on this page, is not about a tangle at all: it is about a pupil copying in an examination, which English calls « cheating ». The older sense of tangling does survive alongside — imbrogliare i fili is to get threads in a knot, and imbrogliarsi is what a story does when it stops adding up — and that is the bridge between the two languages. But in a school rulebook the word to reach for is « cheating », never « imbroglio », which would make it sound as though the school had a scandal rather than a copied paper.