Social roles and relationships

The twenty-eighth entry is il prestigio, and the word reached English by a route that turned it inside out. Latin had praestigiae, a conjuror’s tricks, the sleights that dazzle an audience into seeing what is not there. French kept the word as prestige, and when English borrowed it in the seventeenth century it borrowed exactly that meaning: « prestige » was an illusion, a deception, something done with the hands too fast to follow. The modern sense — standing, the weight a name carries — came back over from French only in the nineteenth century, and it pushed the old one out so thoroughly that no English speaker now hears any trickery in it. Italian never let the first sense go. Il prestigio is the standing this list is about, but il prestigiatore is the stage magician and un gioco di prestigio is a conjuring trick, both perfectly ordinary words. So the two meanings that English separated by two hundred years sit side by side in one Italian dictionary entry, and il prestigio si perde più in fretta di quanto si costruisca is about reputation only because nothing else on the page is about a stage.