Cause and effect in Italian

The thirty-fifth entry is il circolo vizioso, and it comes out in English as « a vicious circle », a translation so exact that it misleads. In present-day English, « vicious » means savage or spiteful: a vicious dog, a vicious remark. A reader who carries that sense into the Italian phrase hears something cruel, and nothing cruel is meant. The expression entered English as a rendering of circulus vitiosus, a term from logic for an argument that proves its conclusion by helping itself to it — a circle with a fault in it. « Vicious » once covered that whole range, straight from vitium, a flaw, and it has kept the old reading nowhere except in this one fossil. Italian never let the word drift. Il vizio is still the defect as much as the bad habit, which is why a lawyer writes un vizio di forma for a procedural flaw and un vizio occulto for a hidden fault in goods. So read vizioso as faulty, not as savage, and the phrase beside it on this page rests on exactly the same reading.