Marketing and advertising

Lo slogan resta in mente per la rima contains a word an English reader will pass over as one of their own, lent to Italian whole and unaltered. It is worth stopping on, because « slogan » is not English either. It came in from Scottish Gaelic sluagh-ghairm, built from sluagh, a host or army, and gairm, a cry: the shout by which a Highland clan gathered its people and named itself in a fight. Earlier English wrote it « slughorn » before the spelling settled, and only in the nineteenth century did the word slide from the battlefield to the platform and then to the hoarding. Italian took it in that last state, along with lo spot and il target. What is worth noticing is that the traffic ran both ways. English hands Italian a clan war cry for the line on the poster, and Italian handed English the word for the older and quieter thing beside it: « motto », which is il motto, a saying carried on a crest. One shout, one saying, and each language borrowed the half it did not have.