Playing sport and watching it

Thirty-sixth on this list is arrivare in finale, and the verb inside it is older and wetter than it looks. Late Latin made arripare out of ad and ripa, the shore: to arrive was to bring a boat in to land. Italian kept the noun as la riva and the verb as arrivare, and English took the verb in from Old French as « arrive » — the same voyage, the same cargo. The picture survives in Italian: arrivare a riva is still a boat touching land, and the verb keeps that sense of reaching a point from outside — arrivare in cima, arrivare al traguardo, arrivare secondo. Knowing that licenses no translation, and this is where the entry earns its place. English does not arrive in a final. A side « reaches the final », « makes the final » or « gets to the final », so nessuno pensava che arrivassero in finale is nobody thought they would reach the final. The Italian verb still does what the boats did; the English one has narrowed to the end of a journey and no longer takes a competition as its destination.