Archaeology and excavation

The fifteenth entry is o sílex, and the two languages hold the same stone at very different distances. O sílex is a technical word in Portuguese: it belongs to a report, a museum label, a finds tray, and outside those it is almost never said. English has a Germanic word instead, « flint », and because it is an old everyday word it never stayed in the trench. Flint was the hardest thing an ordinary household owned and the thing you struck to make fire, so the language built its whole vocabulary of hardness on it. Somebody unmoved is « flinty » or « flint-hearted »; a look can be « flint-eyed »; and the most vivid of them turns hardness into meanness. « He would skin a flint » is said of a man so tight that he would try to get a hide off a stone, and out of that phrase English made a noun: « a skinflint » is a miser, and the word is perfectly current. None of this attaches to o sílex. Portuguese puts that work on a pedra — um coração de pedra, duro como pedra — and leaves the flint to the archaeologists.