The state and its institutions

The thirty-eighth entry is destituire, to remove somebody from an office, and the English word standing on the same root has walked a very long way from it. Both come from Latin destituere, built out of de, down, and statuere, to set up: to set a thing down and leave it standing there, hence to abandon or forsake. Italian kept the hand that does the setting down. Il sindaco è stato destituito dal tribunale says that an authority took the office away from the man who held it, and the noun for the act is la destituzione. « Destitute » kept the other end of the picture, the person left there: forsaken first, then lacking the means to live, so that « a destitute family » today is a matter of money and of nothing else. One formula still joins the two languages, and it is the oldest sense in both. English writes « destitute of » in careful prose; Italian has frozen the same construction in its legal register, and un’accusa destituita di ogni fondamento is a charge with no foundation at all — a charge that has been left standing with nothing under it.