Setting up and working for yourself

The thirteenth entry is la procura, and an English reader arriving from a business page will almost certainly file it in the wrong department. « Procurement » is buying: contracts, suppliers, tenders. La procura buys nothing. It is the written authority by which one person acts in another’s name, so agire per procura is to sign on somebody else’s behalf, and the procura in this list is a document lodged at the register rather than a purchasing function. Italian keeps a second job for the word as well: la Procura della Repubblica is the public prosecutor’s office, because a prosecutor too acts for another party. What makes the trap worth remembering is that English owns the same word already. Behind all of them stands procurare, to see to a matter on another’s behalf. From it English made « procuracy », the mediaeval name for exactly what la procura is; and « procuracy », said quickly for four centuries, wore down into « proxy ». So somebody who votes by proxy is using the Italian word without recognising it.