The audit of the accounts

The twelfth entry is il campionamento di revisione, and the English name for what it produces hides a small accident. « A sample » is not a word in its own right: it is « example » with the front worn away. Anglo-Norman had essample beside exemple, and an unstressed opening syllable falls off easily in English — the same erosion gave « squire » out of « esquire », « spy » out of « espy », « sport » out of « disport », « fence » out of « defence » and « story » out of « history ». Behind every one of them stands Latin exemplum, built on eximere, to take out, which is precisely what the procedure does: one piece lifted out to stand for the rest. Italian took no such shortcut. It kept l’esempio for the example and reached for an entirely separate word for the sample, il campione — the same noun that names the champion, il campione del mondo. So the family resemblance a reader expects sits on the English side and not on the Italian one, and nothing in un campione rappresentativo or campionare will ever suggest an example.