Seafaring and the port

The thirty-ninth entry is il manifesto di carico, and any English reader who already knows « manifesto » will read it wrongly. English keeps two nouns here and will not let them stand in for one another. « A manifest » is a list: the cargo a ship has in her holds, the passengers an aircraft is carrying, the boxes loaded onto a lorry. « A manifesto » is a declaration of intent, the kind a party publishes before an election. Nothing separates them on the page but that last letter, and a shipping clerk who asks for the manifesto has asked for a political programme. Italian spends one word on both, and on a third thing besides: il manifesto is also the sheet pasted on a wall, so il manifesto del film is the poster. Both English nouns go back to the same Latin adjective, manifestus, plain to see, caught in the act — which makes the ship’s paper well named, since it is the document that makes a closed hold visible. So read the whole compound rather than its head: di carico is what tells you which of the two you have in your hand.