Aviation and flight operations

The twenty-fifth entry is il piazzale, the paved ground where aircraft stand and are loaded, and English calls that the apron — a word worn in a kitchen long before it named an airfield, and one that lost a letter on the way. It came from Old French naperon, a small cloth, a diminutive of nape, the cloth spread over a table, and it entered English as « napron ». Then the article did the damage. Said aloud, « a napron » and « an apron » are one and the same noise, and over two centuries the n changed sides: it left the noun and joined the word in front of it. English has done this more than once. « An adder » was « a nadder », the snake Old English called nædre, and « an umpire » was « a noumpere », the odd man who settles a tie. It runs the other way too: « a newt » was once « an ewt ». So the ground beside the terminal has a tablecloth inside it, cut in the wrong place. Italian had no such accident: il piazzale is plainly la piazza made large.