Horses and riding

Thirty-third on the list is il maneggio, the riding stables, and an English reader has been using the word all week without knowing it. Behind it stands the verb maneggiare, to handle, built on la mano and before that on Latin manus. In Italian the noun settled on one thing above all others: the schooling of a horse, and then the ring the schooling happens in. French borrowed it as le manège, and out of that English took two words rather than one. It kept « manège » for the ring, which is why the spelling still looks foreign on an English page; and it took the verb, which lost the horse entirely. To « manage » was at first to put an animal through its paces, then to deal with any awkward thing, then to run a business, and « management » is what a whole profession now calls itself. So the word above the door of a Monday meeting started as the work of two hands on a rein, and il maneggio è chiuso il lunedì is the older sense still standing in a yard outside town.