Eating out

Near the end of the list is gustoso, and it looks like a word an English reader already owns. It is not. Gustoso means tasty, full of flavour, and it belongs to il gusto, which does three jobs at once: the sense itself, the flavour of a particular thing, and a person’s judgement — una questione di gusto. English borrowed that noun in the seventeenth century and kept almost none of it. « Gusto » in Britain today means the relish with which something is done, and it lives inside a single phrase: he ate « with gusto », she sang « with gusto », they attacked the washing-up « with gusto ». It describes the doer and never the thing done, so no soup is ever « gusto ». The word for gustoso is « tasty », or « full of flavour ». « Tasteful » is not it either, because that renders di buon gusto, which is il gusto in its third sense. One Italian noun, three English words — « taste », « flavour », « gusto » — and the borrowed one fits least.