Entomology in Italian

The fourteenth entry is la trappola a caduta, and its English name is a word most speakers now use only in the plural and only about arguments. A « pitfall » was, first and literally, a pit dug in a path and covered over, so that an animal walking across it dropped in and could not climb out. The hunting sense is centuries old, and the trap in this list is the same device shrunk to a plastic cup sunk level with the soil: whatever walks over the rim falls in. Out of that hole came the modern sense, a danger that stays hidden until you are already in it, as in « the pitfalls of translating word for word ». Italian went the same way with a different hole. Il trabocchetto was a trapdoor that gave way under the feet, and today it does the figurative work that « pitfall » does here, so that cadere nel trabocchetto is to walk straight into the hidden danger. So each language kept a literal trap and made a figure of speech out of it, but they did not choose the same trap, and la trappola a caduta never leaves the field.