Family law

The second entry is il divorzio senza addebito, and the word in the middle does not come from the law at all. L’addebito is an accounting term: it is the entry on the debit side of a ledger, and addebitare una somma sul conto is what a bank does when it takes money out. An Italian bank statement uses the word several times a page. The same noun then walks into a courtroom and keeps its shape exactly. Where a marriage has broken down through the conduct of one of the two, the court can pronounce la separazione con addebito, and the finding is charged to that person the way a sum is charged to an account. Senza addebito therefore means that nothing has been entered against either name. English reaches for a quite different picture and speaks of fault — « a no-fault divorce », « the fault-based ground » — where the word belongs to blame and to nothing else. Keeping the two images apart is worth the effort, because l’addebito is not a moral verdict dressed up in figures. It is the ledger word doing what it always did, and what is charged has to be charged to somebody.