Martial arts

La lotta a terra is ground fighting, and the noun at its centre is worth following home. La lotta comes from Latin lucta, a wrestling match, and behind it stands the verb luctari, to wrestle, to struggle bodily against something. Italian kept the word in its plain sense: lottare is what two people do on a mat, and also what a government does against inflation. English took none of that. It borrowed the Latin verb only inside compounds, and in both of them the wrestling has gone invisible. « Reluctant » is re- plus luctari, someone who struggles backwards and digs the heels in; the modern sense of mild unwillingness is all that survives of a fight. « Ineluctable » is in- plus e- plus luctari, that which cannot be struggled out of, the outcome nobody can wrestle free from. So a reader who already owns those two adjectives already owns the root of this entry, and has never once pictured a grip. The mat words came into English from another family — « wrestle » is Germanic — which left the Latin verb free to do abstract work only.