Semiotics

The seventeenth entry is il marchio come segno, and the English word for the same object took a road no Italian word took. « Brand » began as fire. In Old English brand was a flame, and then the burning stick pulled out of one; from there came the verb, to burn a mark into a hide or a cask, and only in the nineteenth century did that scorched mark come to stand for the maker behind the goods. Italian named the same object from the other end. Behind il marchio lies the Germanic marka, a boundary and the sign that shows one, which is also the word that gave English its own « mark ». So the two languages are cousins in one word and strangers in the other: our « trade mark » is il marchio almost letter for letter, while « brand » has no Italian relative at all. The fire survives in Italian only in the verb, marchiare a fuoco, and there it is never commercial. It is livestock, or a reputation nobody can scrub off.