Digital life and data protection

The seventh entry is criptare, to encrypt, and the padlock it names comes from a word about hiding people rather than data. Greek kryptein meant to conceal, and its kryptē was a covered passage, a vault, a chamber out of sight. Latin took it in as crypta, and from there it reached Italian twice, by two different roads. The learned road, the one that copies a written word letter by letter, gave la cripta, the vault under a church, and much later the whole technical family: criptare, criptato, la crittografia. The popular road, where the same crypta was worn down in ordinary mouths, gave la grotta — a cave, still a covered hollow, still somewhere you go in and are no longer seen. English happens to hold both ends of that fork. « Crypt » came out of the books; « grotto » was borrowed from Italian in the seventeenth century, cave and all. So a reader meeting criptare on a settings page is not meeting a new word but a very old one, given something new to hide.