Forestry

The fifteenth entry is a vedação cinegética, the fence that keeps deer off a young plantation, and the adjective is the half worth stopping on. Portuguese has a ready-made word for anything to do with hunting, cinegético, and it comes straight out of Greek: kynēgetikós, built on kynēgétēs, a huntsman, which is kýōn, a dog, joined to ágein, to lead or drive. A hunter, inside that word, is simply the man who takes the dogs out. English kept the dog and lost the hunt. Kýōn is there in « cynic », the nickname worn by philosophers who lived in the street like dogs and were pleased to be called so, and in « cynosure », literally the dog’s tail, the old name of the Little Bear, whose last star is the pole star, so that a cynosure is whatever every eye turns to. The hunting word never settled here. « Cynegetic » sits in a dictionary and nowhere else, and a forester writes « deer fence » or « game fence », naming the animal that is being kept out instead of the sport.