Cars and the garage

Twelfth on this list is o pneu, the shortest word on the page and the one with the longest road behind it. It is a clipping of pneumático, and that adjective reaches Portuguese through Latin from the Greek pneumatikós, built on pneûma, breath or wind. The Portuguese word for a tyre therefore names, quite literally, the air inside it. English has the identical adjective and has put it to entirely different work: a « pneumatic drill », a « pneumatic tube », the branch of engineering called « pneumatics » — all of them about compressed air and none of them about a car. The two languages did meet once, in the phrase « pneumatic tyre », where the qualifier carried the whole point, marking the air-filled wheel off from the solid rubber one. From there they parted. English kept the noun, « tyre », which says nothing whatever about air, and shut « pneumatic » away in the technical register. Portuguese threw the noun away instead, kept the adjective, and cut it to one syllable. So O pneu da frente está furado says, root for root, that the front airy one has a hole in it.