Emails, documents, filing

The eighteenth entry is il refuso, and it is the one word on this list that still carries its own workshop inside it. It is the past participle of rifondere, to pour back or to recast, from Latin refundere, and it was born in the printing house: the piece of metal type that a compositor lifted out and dropped back into the wrong compartment of the case, so that the next hand reaching for an e came up with a c. The mistake was not made in the writing at all — it was made in the tidying up. Italian has kept the word for that one job and no other: un refuso nel titolo is a wrong letter, never a wrong fact, and for a wrong fact the language says un errore. English keeps no memory of any of this. We shortened « typographical error » to « typo », which names the trade but not the accident, and beside it we have « a misprint », which names only the result. One language remembers the compartment; the other remembers the page.