Co-operatives

The thirteenth entry is il diritto di godimento permanente, and the noun in the middle is a close relative of two everyday English words nobody would put beside it. Latin gaudere meant to rejoice, and Italian continues it directly: godere is the verb, il godimento the noun built on top of it. The same root reached us the slow way. The Latin plural gaudia became joie in Old French, which we borrowed as « joy »; the Old French verb joir gave us « enjoy » once en- had been fixed to the front of it, and its compound resjoir gave « rejoice ». So godere, « joy », « enjoy » and « rejoice » are one family, and the reason they no longer look like one is that three of them spent centuries in French mouths and the fourth stayed at home. A trace of the older meaning survives in our own law. A tenant is promised « quiet enjoyment » of the premises, which has nothing to do with pleasure and everything to do with the undisturbed use of a thing — which is exactly what il godimento means here, and in Italian legal writing generally.