The flat and the contract in Italian

Halfway down this list sits il rumore molesto, and the adjective is the most dangerous word on the page for an English reader. Both languages took it from molestus, troublesome, and Italian left it exactly where it was. Molesto is a nuisance and nothing worse: un vicino molesto is a neighbour who is hard to live beside, una mosca molesta is a fly that will not leave you alone, and il rumore molesto is the noise a block of flats complains about at eleven at night. English took the same root and narrowed it almost out of recognition. « Molest » now points at one thing only, an assault on a person, and there is no ordinary sentence left in which a fly or a drill can molest anybody. So a reader who carries the phrase across word for word turns a complaint about a neighbour into a criminal charge. The English word still standing at the old width is « nuisance », and that is the one to reach for. Italian does own the narrow sense as well, but it keeps it in a different word: le molestie, harassment, a noun in the plural, not the everyday adjective in front of you.