Trade and logistics

The twelfth entry is l’inventario, and the English word standing beside it is so plain that nobody looks inside it. « Inventory » rests on the Latin verb invenire, made of in- and venire, to come upon: what a merchant wrote down was never what he believed he owned but what he had come upon when he went and looked. That is exactly the scene in l’inventario si fa la notte del trentuno — somebody walking the aisles and finding. The surprise is the company the word keeps. Invenire also gave « to invent », and for centuries that verb meant to find rather than to make up: in the old teaching of rhetoric, inventio was the finding of the arguments a case already contained, not the manufacture of new ones. English has since pulled the pair so far apart that inventing now sounds like the opposite of finding, while Italian keeps rinvenire, to come upon again, standing quietly beside inventare. The stocktake and the invention began as the same walk along the same shelves.