Drive technology

The eighth entry is o escorregamento do rotor, and English says « rotor slip ». The Portuguese noun is narrow: escorregar is to lose one’s footing, o escorregamento is that happening, and the drive borrows the picture of a rotor falling behind the turning field. The English word is not narrow in the least. « A slip » is a small piece of paper, as in a pay slip or a betting slip, and it is also the slip of the tongue that escaped the speaker. « A slip » is an undergarment. « The slip » is the sloping ground where a boat is launched, and a hull sits « on the slips » while it is built. « To give somebody the slip » is to get away from them, « a slip of a girl » is a thin one, and a gardener’s slips are cuttings meant to root elsewhere. Against all that, the engineering sense is the quietest of the family, and the reader’s work is to let the others go. On this page « slip » is a number and nothing more: the fraction by which the rotor turns slower than the field.