Hiring a tradesman

Il termine per l’eliminazione dei vizi is the deadline by which a builder has to put his own defects right, and the long noun at the centre of it carries a piece of a Roman house. Latin built eliminare out of ex, out of, and limen, the threshold: to eliminate a thing was to carry it over the doorstep and leave it outside. The word kept its shape and lost its picture, so that eliminare and « to eliminate » now mean simply to get rid of, with no door anywhere in sight. Two relatives standing nearby make the doorstep visible again. Preliminare holds prae and limen, what comes before the threshold, which is why anything preliminary happens on the way in and never inside; and « subliminal », coined in the nineteenth century for whatever passes below the threshold of awareness, is the third. Set the three next to each other and they stop looking unrelated: one crosses the doorstep outwards, one waits in front of it, one slips underneath it. Here that is worth holding on to, because the sentence is about getting something out of a house.