Customer service and complaints

Two thirds of the way down sits la scheda della base di conoscenza, and the first noun is an old acquaintance in different clothes. La scheda is a card, a slip, a single sheet made to hold one set of particulars: la scheda tecnica of a product, la scheda elettorale in the booth, la scheda di iscrizione on a desk. Behind it stands Late Latin scheda, a leaf of papyrus, which the language of the notaries then shrank to schedula, a little slip. That diminutive travelled through Old French and arrived in English as « schedule » meaning exactly what Italian still means: a small sheet fastened to a larger document. A lease keeps its « schedules » at the back for that reason to this day. Only with the railways did the word leave paper altogether and attach itself to time, so that « schedule » now names a plan of hours and almost nothing else. One Latin slip, then, and two heirs: Italian kept the object, English kept what tended to be written on it. La scheda is never a schedule; it is the card a schedule used to be written on.