The colonial past

The eleventh entry is la spedizione punitiva, and the noun in the middle of it is one an English reader recognises and then misreads. « Expedition » is in there, right enough, and for this historical term the two match. Everywhere else they part company, because la spedizione earns its living as the sending of a thing: the shipment, the consignment, the dispatch. Le spese di spedizione are the postage on an order, la spedizione è partita ieri says the parcel left the warehouse, and behind all of it stands spedire, to send, as ordinary a verb in Italian as « to post » is here. The trap is the English verb that looks like the obvious partner. « To expedite » sends nothing anywhere; it hurries along something already under way, and it lives in offices and committees. Both words go back to Latin expedire, to free the feet, to get something out of a snare — from which one language kept the getting-it-moving and the other kept the getting-it-gone. So spedire un pacco is not expediting a parcel, and the term in this list holds the older, grander sense only because history froze it there.