Hunting and game

The sixteenth entry is riportare, glossed here as what a gun dog does, and that is the narrowest of the jobs the verb holds. Taken apart it is ri- in front of portare, to carry: to carry back. Everything else follows from that one picture, and English wants a different word each time. The dog that brings the bird to hand « retrieves » it. A newspaper that carries somebody’s words back to the reader riporta le sue parole, and we say it « reports » them. A bookkeeper who takes a figure down to the foot of the next column riporta il totale, and we say he « carries it forward ». Then two where no carrying is visible at all. Riportare una ferita is to come away with a wound, which we « sustain », and riportare una vittoria is to come away with a win, which we simply « win ». Once the thread is named it stays visible: in every one of them something is brought back from the place where the thing happened. So the hunting sense is not a specialist use of the verb. It is the plainest one, and the other four are the same gesture seen at a distance.