Games and game theory at the table

The last entry is il galateo del tavolo, and the middle word was not a word at all to begin with: it was a title. In 1558 a treatise on conduct appeared in Italian as Galateo overo de’ costumi, and the name honoured a churchman, Galeazzo Florimonte, whose Latin form was Galatheus. The book was read for three centuries, and somewhere along the way the title stopped being a title. Il galateo is now an ordinary noun with a small letter, naming the code of manners itself: il galateo vuole che si aspetti, è contro il galateo, and, at this table, il galateo del tavolo. English has nothing of the kind, because the word it uses for the same idea, « etiquette », arrived ready-made from French and carries no author at all. The nearest English came is the phrase every card player knows, « according to Hoyle », after the man who wrote the first handbooks on whist, and it means strictly by the rules. Two languages, two writers, and only one of them ended up in the dictionary as a common noun.