Dance

Twenty-eighth on this list is l’audizione di danza, and the noun in the middle of it is built on a sense that has nothing to do with dancing. Behind it stands Latin audire, to hear, the same verb that gave English « audible », « audience » and « auditorium » — every one of them a faculty or a room for listening. Italian kept that first meaning whole, and uses it daily: l’audizione on its own is a hearing, the act of listening to somebody, and it is the ordinary word for a witness questioned before a committee, l’audizione del testimone. Which is why the two words at the end of this entry are not decoration. Drop them, write l’audizione for a dancer’s trial, and an Italian reader is put in a chamber rather than in a studio; di danza is what moves the ear to the eye. English has the opposite trouble and never notices it, because « audition » has lost the hearing so completely that nobody hears it any more. A dancer auditions in silence, watched from the front of the room, and the word still says she was listened to.