Negotiating and closing contracts

La catena di segnalazione is the line along which a complaint is passed upward, and the English word for the same thing repays a minute because it was assembled backwards. Latin scala is a ladder, and the noun for climbing a wall by ladder travelled through Italian and French into English as « escalade ». Then, at the very start of the twentieth century, a manufacturer registered « escalator » as the trade name of a moving staircase. The verb « to escalate » came afterwards, cut out of that trade name, and at first it meant nothing grander than riding one; the sense every office now uses — a war, a price, a complaint climbing step by step — settled only in the nineteen-fifties. So the most managerial verb in customer service rests on a make of machine. Italian has the whole family too, la scala, scalare, la scalata, and could have built a verb of its own from any of them; instead it borrows l’escalation when it wants the jargon, and otherwise says flatly what happens, la catena di segnalazione — who tells whom, in order.