Criminology

The twenty-third entry is la criminalità dei colletti bianchi, and it is the one term on this list that Italian did not build for itself. It is a loan translation of « white-collar crime », a phrase coined by the American sociologist Edwin Sutherland in 1939 and carried from there into one European language after another. The image is a shirt. The collar of a man who worked in an office was starched and white because the work never dirtied it, while the man in the workshop wore blue. English keeps the whole pair alive — a « white-collar job », a « blue-collar town » — and Italian has taken the family with it, so i colletti bianchi now names the office staff themselves and not only their offences. What the borrowing quietly hides is that il colletto on its own is the ordinary collar of a shirt, and nothing more. A reader who meets i colletti bianchi in a newspaper and thinks of laundry has understood the words and missed the term, which is the standing cost of a calque: the parts stay transparent long after the whole has stopped being literal.