Geology and mining

The twenty-sixth entry is la degradazione meteorica, weathering, and a reader who takes it word for word ends up somewhere in outer space. « Meteoric » in English does two jobs and neither is any use here: it belongs to a meteor, or — far more often — it means sudden and spectacular, as in « a meteoric rise », said of a career that went up like a burning stone. Italian kept the adjective on the older road. The Greek meteoros meant raised up, up in the air, and it gave its name to the study of everything that happens overhead; that is why the forecast is le previsioni meteo and the office issuing it is il servizio meteorologico. Meteorico is the adjective of that, not of the falling stone. So l’acqua meteorica is rainwater, le precipitazioni meteoriche are plain precipitation, and la degradazione meteorica is what frost, rain and air do to rock where it stands. For the stone from the sky Italian keeps separate words, la meteora and il meteorite, and it never builds the adjective on those. The rule is short: where English hears meteors, Italian means weather.