Ornithology

The fourteenth entry is il conteggio lungo transetto, and the last word of it is a trap English laid rather than Italian. We keep two nouns a single letter apart that have nothing to do with each other. A « transect » is the line a surveyor walks, counting whatever shows up on either side of it; it rests on Latin sectum, cut, and is therefore a cut taken across a piece of country. A « transept » is the arm that crosses the nave of a church, and it comes from saeptum, an enclosure, something fenced off. Two words, two roots, one letter between them, and most readers never have to hold them apart because the two subjects never meet. Italian writes both il transetto. Whatever road each of them took into the language, they arrived at the same spelling, so a guide to a basilica and a bird report use the identical form, one for the crossing arm and one for the walked line. Nothing inside the word decides which; only the sentence around it does. In this list it is always the line.