Festivals and customs

The eleventh entry is o desfile, the parade, and it is transparent in a way its English relative no longer is. The Portuguese noun rests on a fila, the row or the queue, and on the verb desfilar, to move along in a row — which is what a parade does and what the word says. French built the same thing on file, and English borrowed it in the seventeenth century as « to defile », to march past in single file, together with « a defile », the narrow pass that forces a column to do so. That borrowing then walked into an accident. English already had an unrelated « to defile », meaning to make foul, inherited from a native verb; the two settled on the same six letters, and the newcomer was squeezed out of ordinary speech by the older one. The marching sense now survives only in military prose and on maps. So the word a reader needs for O desfile começa às dez is « the parade », or « the procession » when the saint is carried, and the cousin English already owns is no help at all.