Tunnelling

The twenty-first entry is il cedimento in superficie, and the noun has no single English word behind it. Cedere is to give way, and il cedimento is the giving way itself, whatever it is that yields. In the ground it is what this list means: the surface comes down a little over a tunnel, and English calls that settlement. In a structure it is failure — il cedimento strutturale is the beam or the wall going, and no English engineer would call that settlement. In a person it is the moment of giving in: ha avuto un cedimento says that somebody who had been holding out stopped holding out, in a negotiation, in a diet or in front of one question too many, and senza cedimenti praises a resolve that never once slipped. One noun, then, for the slow sinking of a street, the collapse of a beam and a climbdown at the table, and the thought underneath it is that all three are the same event: something stopped resisting. English picks its word from the thing that gave way, Italian from the giving way.