Glaciology

The sixth entry is la lingua glaciale, the glacier tongue, and the noun in the middle of it is one that Italian works far harder than English works « tongue ». Three sayings are worth carrying away. Avere la lingua lunga, to have a long tongue, is said of somebody who repeats what should have stayed unsaid, and English moves to another part of the face for it: « to have a big mouth ». Essere una malalingua puts the same charge into a single noun, a bad-tongue, the person who speaks ill of everyone, where English needs a whole phrase. And la lingua batte dove il dente duole, the tongue keeps going where the tooth hurts, says that nobody can leave alone the thing that is wrong with them; there is no English proverb for it. One crosses without a scratch, because it describes the mouth and not the character: ce l’ho sulla punta della lingua is « on the tip of my tongue », word for word. None of that is audible in la lingua del ghiacciaio si è ritirata — but a reader who has met the idioms first will hear them anyway.