Meat processing

The twelfth entry is il budello, and an English reader already owns the word without knowing it. Latin had botulus, a sausage, and beside it a diminutive, botellus, a little sausage — which is exactly what a length of gut looks like once it has been filled. Italian took botellus and wore it down to il budello, still the casing a butcher soaks before filling it. Old French took the same botellus and made boel, which crossed the Channel and settled in English as « bowel ». So the word on the Italian order sheet and the word in an English medical note are one Latin diminutive that travelled by two roads. The parent noun came later and by the front door: « botulism » is named straight from botulus, because the poisoning was first traced to sausages. Two details keep the Italian honest. The plural splits — le budella, feminine, for somebody’s insides, and i budelli for casings and for anything tube-shaped. And un budello is also a lane so narrow that a van cannot turn in it.