Geriatrics

The eleventh entry is a confusão aguda, and Portuguese names the thing exactly as a nurse meets it: confusion, and sudden. English owns that plain phrase too, and « acute confusion » goes into notes every day, but the word a ward reaches for first is « delirium », and it comes off a field. Latin delirare is de plus lira, and a lira is the ridge of earth a plough throws up between two furrows. To delirare was to leave that line: the ox swings wide, the furrow stops being straight, and somebody has to bring the share back. Rome was using the verb for a mind off its track long before any physician was, and the noun came into English whole, ending and all, which is why a journal still writes « deliria » in the plural. Nothing of the field survives in a confusão aguda, which describes only what is seen, and nothing of it is heard in « delirium » either. The buried picture is the better one all the same, because what the word reports is not a person who has stopped, but one who was going straight and is now going somewhere else.