Washing, grooming and the hairdresser

Seventh on this list is lo shampoo, which Italian has taken from English without touching a letter, the way it took lo sport and il weekend. What is worth knowing is that English had taken it from somewhere else first. « Shampoo » came in from Hindi chāmpo, the imperative of a verb meaning to press or to knead, and for roughly a century it named a massage and nothing else: to shampoo somebody was to work their limbs, and a shampooing establishment was a bath house, not a salon. Only towards the middle of the nineteenth century did the word climb to the head, and only after that did it settle on the soap rather than on the rubbing. So the bottle in an Italian bathroom is labelled with an instruction to knead, travelled through two languages and read as a noun by everybody. Two practical notes. Italian keeps the word invariable, so the plural is carried by the article alone, gli shampoo. And the naturalised spelling sciampo exists and is correct, though what is printed on the shelf is the English form.