Noises and voices

The twenty-fifth entry is tintinnare, and an English reader already owns its root without knowing it. Latin had tinnire, to ring with a thin metallic sound, and beside it the reduplicated tintinnare, which said the same thing twice over: the ringing that keeps going. From tintinnare came the noun tintinnabulum, a small bell, and from that English took « tintinnabulation », a word that now survives almost only in verse. From tinnire itself medicine took « tinnitus », which is Latin for a ringing, and handed it to the sound a patient hears when nothing at all is ringing. So the two English descendants went off to the far edges of the language, one poetic and one clinical, and left the middle empty: for keys in a pocket English reaches for « jingle », a word with no Latin in it whatever. Italian kept the ordinary job and does it every day, with le chiavi tintinnano, i bicchieri tintinnano, il campanello tintinna. Reading tintinnare as « tinnitus » therefore puts an illness where the sentence has nothing but a pocketful of keys.