The tannery

The twenty-first entry is lo scamosciato, and the two languages reached the same soft, napped leather from opposite ends of Europe. Italian named it after an animal. Il camoscio is the chamois, the goat-antelope of the Alps, whose skin was dressed to exactly that velvet finish, and scamosciare is the verb for working a surface until it takes a nap; una giacca scamosciata is a suede jacket and nothing else. English named it after a country. « Suede » is French Suède, Sweden, cut out of gants de Suède, Swedish gloves, which is how the material arrived in the shops of Paris, and the accent fell off on the way into English. The animal did not vanish from English — it moved to another shelf. « Chamois », commonly written « shammy », is the yellow wash-leather kept for drying a car, and nobody selling shoes would reach for the word. So the pair has to be crossed rather than matched: lo scamosciato is « suede », and the animal that gave Italian its word gave English a cloth for the garage.