Birth and Midwifery

The sixteenth entry is a apresentação pélvica, and Portuguese names the thing the way a textbook would: the presentation is pelvic, and every word in the phrase is still in ordinary use, because anybody who knows a pelve can work the adjective out. English calls the same thing a breech presentation, and « breech » is a word that survives almost nowhere else. It is the old name for the buttocks and for the garment that covers them, which is why « breeches » are trousers, and why the back end of a gun, where it is loaded, is called its breech. Outside those few corners the word is dead: nobody has a breech, and no doctor writes about breech pain. What is left is a fossil kept alive by the one phrase a midwife needs, and a reader meeting it for the first time has nothing in the rest of the language to guess from. The two names also point at different things. The English one says which part of the baby arrives first; the Portuguese one says only which region of the body is doing the arriving.