Product liability

The fifteenth entry is l’importatore, and the verb under it does a second job in Italian that English has all but given up. Latin importare was built from in and portare, to carry in, and both languages took the trade sense from it: importare merci is to import goods, and this entry names the person who does it. Italian kept the figurative step as well. To carry something in is to bring consequence with it, and from there importare came to mean simply to matter: non importa is it does not matter, che importa? is what difference does it make, non me ne importa nulla is I could not care less, and the person it matters to arrives as an indirect object, a lui non importa di niente. English once walked the same road and then left it. The sense survives in the adjective « important », which is exactly that meaning, and in the noun « import », as in a matter of some import. For everyday use English reaches instead for « to matter », a verb from another family altogether, so the tie between the customs hall and the thing that counts is invisible.