Training and competition

The seventh entry is il fiato, glossed here as stamina, and one Italian noun stands where English keeps three. At the bottom of it is plain breath, the air that goes in and out: trattenere il fiato is to hold your breath, and con il fiato sospeso is with bated breath. From there it becomes what a runner has or has not got. Dopo la salita non ho più fiato is the sentence on this page, and it reports a lack of staying power rather than a lack of air; avere fiato is to be able to keep going, and rimanere senza fiato is to be winded. It then walks into the orchestra, where gli strumenti a fiato are the wind instruments, the ones played with breath instead of a bow. And it does what breath does for us when something is overwhelming: una vista che toglie il fiato is a view that takes your breath away. English shares that ground out between « breath », « wind » and « stamina », and the three refuse to swap. Nobody runs out of breath on a climb and calls it stamina, and no orchestra has a stamina section.