Spaceflight

The twenty-fifth entry is la coperta termica, and the first word carries a figure of speech that has no blanket in it in English at all. La coperta is the ordinary bedcover, the thing pulled up in January. From it comes la coperta è corta, « the blanket is short », which is what an Italian mayor, minister or finance director says when a sum of money has to cover more claims than it can reach: pull it over the schools and the hospitals are left in the cold. Its companion is tirare la coperta dalla propria parte, to pull the blanket across to one’s own side, said of whoever looks after his own department and lets the rest freeze. English uses a different picture for each of those two situations and a bed for neither: « robbing Peter to pay Paul » for the first, « looking after one’s own corner » for the second. So a spacecraft’s coperta termica really is a thermal blanket and nothing else; but the same noun on a front page is almost always about money.