Public procurement law

The seventeenth entry is il motivo di esclusione, and the noun inside it works harder in Italian than its English look-alike does. Il motivo is first of all the reason: il motivo del ritardo, per quale motivo, and here the ground on which a bidder is put out of the running. The same word is also the tune somebody hums, il motivo di una canzone, and the shape that repeats on a fabric, un tessuto a motivi floreali. English covers that ground with two words rather than one. « Motive » kept the first sense alone and then narrowed inside it, so that it now smells of the charge sheet: a motive is what a suspect is said to have had. For the tune and for the pattern English went to French and borrowed « motif », the same Latin word arriving a second time by a later road. So in a contract notice motivo has to be read as « ground » or « reason », never as « motive », which would quietly accuse somebody; and motivo met on a curtain is not a stray usage but one word doing its other job.