Haematology

Entry eleven is a célula blástica, and the English for it is « a blast cell », two words that look like an explosion and are nothing of the kind. The « blast » of a bomb or of a winter wind is Germanic: Old English blǣst, a blowing. The « blast » of the laboratory is Greek blastós, a sprout, the shoot a seed puts out. It names a cell that has not yet grown into anything in particular, which is exactly why finding one in the blood is worth a telephone call rather than a line in the file. Portuguese has no collision to manage here, because blástico belongs to the second family and to nothing else; the bomb is a explosão, the gust of wind is a rajada, and neither word ever comes near the marrow. An English reader can keep the two apart by looking for the sprout elsewhere in the vocabulary: an osteoblast builds new bone, a fibroblast lays down new fibre, and in each of them the element means young and growing, never violent.