Building conservation

The tenth entry is argamassa de cal, and the English noun that renders it is carrying two other loads at the same time. « Mortar » is the lime-and-sand mixture a mason beds stone in; it is also the heavy bowl a cook or a pharmacist pounds things in, the one that comes with a pestle; and it is the short stubby gun that lobs a shell high and drops it. Behind all three stands the Latin mortarium, which named the bowl and nothing else. What was pounded inside took the vessel’s name, and centuries later so did the gun, because a squat wide-mouthed barrel standing on end looks like one. Even the academic cap belongs to the family: a « mortarboard » is named after the flat square board on which a bricklayer carries his mortar. Portuguese keeps the three apart, and only one of them still shows the Latin word — a argamassa for the mixture, o almofariz for the bowl, which came in from Arabic, and o morteiro for the weapon. A sentence about argamassa can therefore never be misread; an English one sometimes has to be read twice.