Insurance and contracts in Italian

Thirty-fourth on this list is risarcire, and the picture inside it is a needle. The Latin verb sarcire meant to patch, to mend, to sew a torn thing shut; resarcire, with the prefix that means over again, meant to make the repair good, and that compound came down into Italian as risarcire with hardly a letter altered. So la compagnia risarcisce entro sessanta giorni does not, in its own image, describe a payment at all: it describes a hole being sewn up, and the money is only the thread. English has the same root and keeps it in a single word. Sartor in Latin was the patcher, the patcher became the tailor, and that is why a well-cut suit is « sartorial » while nothing else in English remembers sarcire. The two words now stand very far apart, one in a claims letter and one in a fashion column, and both of them say mending. It is worth holding on to, because risarcire is not « to refund »: nobody is being handed their own money back, something broken is being put right.