Fisheries

Entry ten is a captura acessória, and English gives it one solid word, « bycatch », whose first syllable is the part worth slowing down for. It is not the preposition « by » that marks who did something. It is an old prefix meaning beside, secondary, off to one side of the main business, and once it is recognised it opens a small closed family that most readers already half know. « A by-product » is what a process makes while it is making something else. « A bystander » is the person beside the event rather than in it. « A byway » is the lane off the main road, « a by-election » the vote held between general elections, « a bypass » the road that goes round a town, and « a byword » the name a thing becomes when it has come to stand for something else. Three points follow for this page. The prefix always subordinates, so « bycatch » says at once that this is not what the boat went out for. The spelling has largely closed up, and « bycatch » is written solid where « by-election » keeps its hyphen. And Portuguese carries the same idea in a separate adjective, acessória, so one term here answers two there.