Developmental psychology

The twentieth entry is l’effetto di coorte, and the noun inside it has a second life in English that Italian never gave it. Both languages start in the same place. A cohors was one of the ten units of a Roman legion, and from that both took the sense wanted here, a set of people who share a starting point in time and are then followed: la coorte di nascita is the birth cohort, and the two phrases match word for word. Then English carried the word somewhere else. In the plural, and almost only in the plural, « his cohorts » are somebody’s companions and hangers-on, with a whiff of disapproval about them. That reading grew out of a misreading — a cohort was a body of men, so a cohort became one of the men — and for many readers it now comes first. Italian did not follow. La coorte stayed with the legion and with the statistics, and for the hangers-on the language says i seguaci or il codazzo instead.