Genetics and inheritance

The twentieth entry is a excisão dos intrões, and the striking thing is that the two languages have named opposite halves of one event. A excisão is the cutting out: the introns are taken away and the coding pieces are left behind. English calls the whole process « splicing », and « to splice » has never once meant to cut. It is a rope-maker’s verb. To splice two ropes is to unlay the strands at each end and weave them into one another until the join holds and barely thickens the line, and the word came ashore with the same job: a film editor splices two strips of film, an electrician splices two wires. So « RNA splicing » is named for the moment the coding pieces are joined up, and « the spliceosome » is named after the join as well. The verb has one more life worth carrying away, because it turns up where no molecule ever does: « to get spliced » is an old and still cheerful way of saying to get married. One process, two languages, and each has put a different half of it in the name.