Motor sport

The twenty-second entry is l’omologazione, and a reader of English already owns the word without owning its life. « Homologation » here is a term of art and nothing else: it belongs to motor sport and to type approval, it is rarely said outside them, and most speakers would hesitate over what it covers. In Italian the same word is ordinary office vocabulary. Omologare is what an authority does when it declares that something meets the standard, so a helmet, a boiler, a set of scales and a building are all omologati, and a court omologa an agreement to give it force. Out of that everyday use grew a second sense English cannot follow at all. L’omologazione is also the process by which everything comes to resemble everything else — a high street, a television schedule, a way of speaking — and omologato, said of a person, means somebody who has stopped differing from anyone. At the track the word is purely technical; in a newspaper, un paese omologato is a complaint about sameness and not a certificate.