Linguistics

The seventeenth entry is la declinazione, and English has cut into three what Italian holds in one. Latin declinare meant to bend away from a straight line, and every later sense is that bending applied to something else. English gave each application a noun of its own. A « declension » is the grammatical one, the set of case endings a noun bends through. A « declination » is the astronomical and magnetic one, the angle by which something leans off a reference line. A « decline » is the everyday one, a falling away in health, in numbers or in power. Italian uses la declinazione for the first two without blinking — la declinazione dei nomi latini and la declinazione magnetica — and sends only the third to a word of its own, il declino. The verb holds the whole family together: declinare un sostantivo, declinare un invito and, at a police desk, declinare le generalità, which is to give your name and address. That last one has no English relative at all, and reading it as a refusal turns a citizen who complied into one who would not.