Saving energy at home

The twenty-fifth entry is il soffione della doccia, and the second noun is one English already owns without knowing whose it is. La doccia is simply the shower, and fare la doccia is what everybody does before leaving the house. Beneath it lies the Latin ductus, the leading of water along a channel, which also stands beneath « aqueduct » and « duct »: an Italian doccia was first the pipe or the gutter that brought water down a wall, and only afterwards the thing one stands under. French took the word from Italian in the sixteenth century as douche and kept all of it, so that in French it is still the shower of every morning. English borrowed it from French two centuries later and kept almost none of it, narrowing « douche » to an irrigation done for hygiene and, later still, to an insult. The everyday word of one language is the clinical word of another, and a reader of English who meets fare la doccia is meeting an ancestor they would not name at the table.