Feelings and character in Italian

Halfway down the adjectives sits preoccupato, and it is the most expensive word on this list for an English reader, because the wrong reading still produces a sentence that makes sense. Preoccupato means worried, anxious, uneasy about something that might go wrong: sono preoccupata per lui is what a mother says, and non sono preoccupato is a denial of fear and nothing else. The verb beside it, preoccuparsi, is to worry, and la preoccupazione is a worry — countable, the one that keeps a person awake. « Preoccupied » kept the older and more literal sense: occupied in advance, the attention already spoken for, so that a preoccupied colleague is not frightened but absent, looking past you, thinking about something else. Both descend from Latin praeoccupare, to seize beforehand, and each language took one half of the seizing — Italian the dread that gets there first, English the mind that is already busy. The practical consequence is small and constant: somebody preoccupato needs reassuring, somebody preoccupied needs the question repeated. Say « worried » or « anxious » for the Italian word, and use distratto or assorto for the English one.