Precise adjectives

The twenty-second entry is casuale, and it is the one adjective on this page an English reader will get backwards without noticing. Casuale is about chance and nothing else: il risultato è casuale says the outcome was random, un incontro casuale is a chance meeting, and a caso means at random. It says nothing about how anybody was dressed or how anybody behaved. English « casual » went the other way. It keeps the chance sense only in fossils such as « a casual acquaintance » and « casual labour », and its ordinary meaning is now informal, unhurried, off-hand. The two are close enough at the root, Latin casus, a falling, for the mistake to feel safe, and far enough apart that una spiegazione casuale is an explanation arrived at by chance rather than a relaxed one. The neat part is what Italian did next: it borrowed « casual » straight back, unchanged and unaccented, for clothes and manner, so un abbigliamento casual and vestirsi casual now sit beside casuale. One final e separates chance from comfort.