Air quality management

The twenty-sixth entry is il composto organico volatile, and the adjective that closes it leads a second life in Italian that « volatile » has never led in English. The shared ancestor is the Latin volatilis, able to fly, built on volare. English took the word for the chemistry alone, and then lent it to tempers and markets, so « a volatile compound » and « a volatile situation » are the whole of its range. Italian kept the flying. As an adjective volatile covers the same chemical sense and adds the idea of what is light and will not stay put. As a noun it is simply a bird: i volatili are winged creatures, and i volatili da cortile are the birds of a farmyard. Read the term with that in the ear and it stops being a label and becomes a description, a compound that takes flight from the tin without anybody heating it. The same flight is audible in svolazzare, to flutter about, and in il volo, the flight itself.