Eating out, in more detail

Near the end of the list stands scotto, and it is one half of a pair of words that Italian spells the same way and keeps entirely apart. The one on this page is an adjective, the past participle of scuocere, to overcook, from the Latin excoquere: il riso era scotto says the rice had been boiled to a mush, and it says nothing else. The other scotto is a masculine noun, and it means the reckoning at an inn, the share of a meal that each guest settles. That one is not Latin at all. It reached Italian from Longobardic, from the Germanic skot, a contribution of money, and today it survives mainly in pagare lo scotto, to pay the price for something. An English reader owns that word already without knowing it. Old English had the same Germanic noun as sceot, a payment, and the Old Norse skot reinforced it, so that it came through as « scot », a levy or a tax. One phrase still carries it: whoever gets away with something gets away « scot-free », which is to say without paying his share of the bill.