Maps and surveying

The twenty-fourth entry is la triangolazione, and in its literal work the two languages agree exactly: a net of triangles over the ground, every station sighted from two others, the whole thing hanging on one measured baseline. La triangolazione parte da una base misurata con cura could be an English sentence word for word. What has happened since is that both languages carried the noun out of the field, and neither went where the other went. English handed « triangulation » to politics, where it names the manoeuvre of a candidate who sets himself at a measured distance from two opposing camps and claims the ground between them; a commentator who writes about triangulation is describing positioning, not angles. Italian never made that journey. It gave la triangolazione to football, where it is the quick exchange of passes among three players that works the ball past a defence, and to trade, where una triangolazione is a deal routed through a third country. So the same technical noun turns up in a match report and in a customs file, and a reader carrying the political sense finds nothing to hang it on.