Tanning

The fifteenth entry is o engorduramento, and the English word for it hides a trap. The operation is « fatliquoring », and the noun sitting inside it is « liquor ». In Portuguese o licor is a sweet drink and nothing else, so the compound reads like a joke about a well-oiled works. It is not. « Liquor » in English keeps an older and far wider sense: any liquid that a process works in or leaves behind. A brewer calls his water « liquor » before it has met any malt; a chemist pours off the « mother liquor » once the crystals have dropped out of it; a cook keeps the « cooking liquor » from the pot; and a tanner runs the hides through the « tanning liquor », then feeds them the « fatliquor », an emulsion of oil and water that puts back the grease the lime took out. The drink sense came later and is strongest in American use. So the word asks a different question from the one a reader expects: not what is in the glass, but what is in the drum.