The garden and its plants

The twenty-fourth entry is maduro, glossed « ripe » because that is what the plum on this page needs. The gloss is true and it is half the word. Portuguese uses maduro wherever a thing has finished becoming what it was going to be, and English long ago split that single idea between an inherited word and a borrowed one. « Ripe » is the old Germanic one, and it stays with what grows and is eaten: « ripe plums », « ripe corn », « a ripe melon ». « Mature » arrived from Latin maturus, which is the very word maduro descends from, and it took everything else: « a mature reader », « a mature wine », « a mature market », « a bond that matures ». So As ameixas ainda não estão maduras is about fruit while um homem maduro is about a man, and one adjective will not carry both into English. The costly direction is outwards: the noun has to be looked at before the adjective is chosen. Inwards there is less to decide, though not nothing, since a mature cheese is um queijo curado and never maduro.