Bookkeeping and the balance sheet

The third entry is l’attivo, and the plainest thing about it is how little work it does. L’attivo is an adjective wearing an article — active, made into a noun the way Italian builds half a balance sheet: il passivo, il netto, il lordo. The English word in its place comes from somewhere far stranger. « Assets » began as the Anglo-Norman asetz, the ancestor of modern French assez, enough, out of Latin ad satis. In a mediaeval court, to have asetz was to have goods enough to meet the claims standing against you, and the word was a singular: a quantity, not a collection. Only later was that final -s heard as a plural, and somebody cut the word in half and produced « asset », which no lawyer had ever written. So the English name for everything a company owns is a back-formation from « enough », a word about sufficiency rather than about property, while Italian merely says which side of the page is which. That is worth remembering when l’attivo is a heading rather than a total.