What a thing is like in Italian

The sixth adjective here is morbido, and it is the one an English reader should look at twice. It means « soft » — soft to the touch, soft to the bite: il pane è già morbido, una coperta morbida, capelli morbidi. It is the word for a cushion, a jumper and a ripe pear. « Morbid », which an English speaker hears inside it, means nothing of the kind: it describes an unhealthy fascination with death and illness, and its nearest relatives here are « morbidity » and « morbidly », all of them clinical or grim. Yet the two really are one word. Both descend from Latin morbidus, built on morbus, disease, and the sense that survived into English is the older one. Italian travelled the other way — diseased, then sickly, then yielding under the hand — and kept only the pleasant end of that range, which is why morbido is a compliment in a shop and « morbid » never is. When the grim sense is genuinely wanted, Italian has morboso: the same root again, deliberately held apart.