Water and waste water

The last entry is la paratoia, the gate that shuts off a channel, and its first half is the most productive piece of word-building in Italian. It is not a prefix. It is para, the verb parare in the third person, meaning it wards off — and the language makes a noun by putting that verb in front of whatever is being warded off. Il parabrezza wards off the breeze, il parafango the mud, il paraurti the knocks, il parafulmine the lightning, il parasole the sun, i paraocchi everything the horse would otherwise see. Once the pattern is visible, half of them can be read before they have ever been met. English has no such machine. It names each of those objects separately and from a different angle — the screen, the guard, the bumper, the rod, the blinkers — so the family stays invisible and every word has to be learnt on its own. The single member that crossed over came through French and kept its shape: « parachute », which is exactly para and then the fall.