Q. CMOS 7.55: “Italics are the traditional choice for singling out non-English words and phrases in an English-language context. . . . If a term becomes familiar through repeated use, it need be italicized only on its first occurrence. If it appears only rarely, italics may be retained.” What’s your reasoning?
A. I can’t divine the reasoning of the original framers of this advice, but the convention makes sense to me as a reader. When a term from another language is introduced, the italics signal that it isn’t a typo—it’s a word from a language that may be unfamiliar. Once we get the idea—once we learn the word—repeated italics become distracting. If the word occurs only occasionally, however, we might not learn it (especially if there are many such terms in the document). In that case, the italics are appropriate for what remains an unfamiliar term.