Surveying

The eleventh entry is la geometria dei satelliti, where the noun is meant literally: where the satellites happen to stand decides how firmly the position is pinned down. But that same noun has a second life in Italian which English cannot follow into ordinary speech. A geometria variabile is a set phrase, and it is everywhere. It came out of aviation, where un’ala a geometria variabile is a wing that swings back as the aircraft speeds up, and it now describes anything whose shape is rearranged according to the matter in hand: una maggioranza a geometria variabile is a majority that re-forms vote by vote, un’Europa a geometria variabile a union whose members sign up to different parts of it, una squadra a geometria variabile a side that lines up differently every week. English does own « variable geometry », but it stayed jargon: aviation, and then the specialised prose written about the European Union. Everywhere else it reaches for « shifting », for « flexible », for « ad hoc » or for « case by case ». Carry the image across and the sentence turns technical; carry the idea across and it sounds English.