Falconry

Entry eighteen is il rapace di passo, a bird trapped on migration rather than taken from the nest, and English calls it « a passage hawk ». Beside it stands a word most speakers use every week without any idea where it came from. A hawk caught after it has reached adult plumage is « a haggard », and in falconry that is a plain technical description: an old bird, fully wild, slower to train and quicker to go back to the woods. The falconers had the word first, and had it for a long time. From the mews it travelled outwards, first as an adjective for anything untamed and unmanageable, then, by the short step from a wild bird’s look to a human one, as the word for a face that is drawn, hollow and worn out. Today « haggard » is what a newspaper writes about somebody after a sleepless night, and the bird has disappeared from it completely. Italian handles the same idea with a phrase instead of a noun: di passo records when the bird was taken, and nothing in it has ever moved into everyday speech.