Rowing and canoeing in Italian

The eleventh entry is il timoniere, and the two languages built the same job out of entirely different material. Italian took il timone, the rudder, from Latin temo, temonis, which was the pole of a cart or a plough, and put a person on the end of it: whoever works the rudder is il timoniere. English named nobody after the rudder at all. « Coxswain » is a compound of two old words — « cock », a cockboat, the small boat a bigger ship carried, and « swain », a servant or a lad, from Old Norse sveinn. The cox was the boy put in charge of the ship’s boat, and the sport kept the title long after the boat and the errand were gone. Two things follow from that. The clipped form « cox » is also a verb, and Italian has none: to cox a crew is fare da timoniere, three words for one. And where English marks the boat class with an adjective, « coxed » or « coxless », Italian marks it with a bare preposition and stops there — il quattro con, il due senza.