Nature and the environment

Tenth on this list is l’alluvione, and it is the one word here an English reader will recognise and then file under the wrong heading. Latin alluvio was built on alluere, to wash against, and the two languages divided its sense between them without leaving a signpost. English kept the deposit. « Alluvium » is the silt a river drops, « alluvial » describes the flat ground made out of it, and « alluvion », the rare legal term, names the slow gain of land at a water’s edge. Not one of the three is an event, and none of them hurts anybody. Italian kept the water. L’alluvione is the flood itself, the thing in the news — l’alluvione ha portato via il vecchio ponte — and the words built on it follow it there: gli alluvionati are the people whose houses filled up, and le zone alluvionate are the streets still under water. So the two adjectives part company: « alluvial » describes soil, alluvionale describes damage. A reader who takes alluvione for silt has quietly turned a catastrophe into geology.