The stock market and securities in Italian

The twenty-fourth entry is la stanza di compensazione, and the first of its words is one English already owns, in a disguise. La stanza in Italian is a room — una casa di tre stanze, la stanza da letto — and behind it stands Latin stare, to stand: a stanza is a standing place, somewhere you stop. English borrowed the word in the sixteenth century from writers on verse, who used it for a block of lines, and kept nothing else: a « stanza » is a unit of a poem and never a bedroom, so no English reader hears a room inside it. Italian kept both, with the metrical sense shut away in old verse forms. That is why the clearing house here is a room. Where English built a house for the netting of claims, Italian named the chamber the clerks sat in to set one debt against another, and French and Spanish did the same. The picture is identical and only the building differs, which is worth remembering when la stanza di compensazione si mette in mezzo alle due parti turns up in a text about settlement rather than about poetry.