Landscape architecture

The sixth entry is la pavimentazione drenante, and the noun inside it is the one that goes wrong. La pavimentazione is the surfacing of anything walked or driven on — a road, a square, a courtyard — and il pavimento, the shorter form, is the floor of a room, the tiles under the kitchen table. Neither of them is a « pavement ». In Britain the « pavement » is the raised strip at the side of the road kept for people on foot, what an American calls a « sidewalk », and a car that mounts the pavement has done something serious. When the surfacing itself has to be named, the word here is « paving » — « block paving », « paving slabs » — or, for a road, the « carriageway surface ». So this entry is « permeable paving », and « draining pavement » would describe a wet footway. The trap is a quiet one, because both words come down from the same Latin pavimentum, a floor beaten flat with a rammer: one language stayed on the surface, the other walked off with it to the side of the road.