Continuing education

The seventeenth entry is l’unità didattica, and the adjective inside it is one an English reader is almost bound to misjudge. Both languages took the word from Greek didaktikos, skilled in teaching, and both took it late and through Latin. Italian kept it as a plain technical adjective with no feeling in it whatever: il materiale didattico is teaching material, l’attività didattica is the teaching half of a lecturer’s job as against research, il personale didattico is the teaching staff, and l’unità didattica is simply the block a course has been cut into. English let the same adjective drift into a verdict. To call a novel, a speech or a colleague « didactic » is to say that the lesson is showing and that the listener is being talked down to, so the word now keeps company with « preachy » rather than with « instructional ». The cost runs one way and is easy to pay by accident: an Italian timetable full of attività didattiche is describing ordinary classes, while an English report calling a course didactic has quietly attacked it.