House and technology

Second on the list stands o interruptor, and it is worth a stop, because the two languages named the same small object from opposite ends. Portuguese named the job. Interromper is to break something off in the middle, from the Latin interrumpere, inter plus rumpere, to break between — so o interruptor is, quite literally, the thing that breaks the current. English owns that word as well, but « interrupter » stayed in the workshop and never reached the wall beside the door. What went up there instead was « switch », and it began as a thing rather than as an action: in the sixteenth century a switch was a thin whippy stick, the kind cut from a hedge and used on a horse. The railways took it next, for the movable length of rail that sends a train one way rather than the other, and from the railway it passed to electricity in the eighteen-sixties. So o interruptor está atrás da porta names a breaker of circuits, while the English sentence beside it is still carrying a rail, and behind that a twig.