Amphibians and reptiles

The seventh entry is a respiração cutânea, and the adjective in it opens a drawer English keeps in three separate places. Portuguese has one ordinary noun, a pele, and one learned adjective built on the Latin cutis, cutâneo, and that is the whole apparatus. We have three words, and each of them has been given a different job. « Skin » is the everyday one, and it is not even native: it came in from Old Norse skinn and pushed aside the word Old English already had. That older word is « hide », which survived by narrowing, until it now names the skin of an animal and above all that skin once it has been taken off and sold. « Cutaneous » arrived much later by the learned road, straight from cutis, and it has never left the clinic: « a cutaneous infection », « cutaneous respiration ». So a frog that breathes through a pele breathes through its « skin » in a field guide, through a « cutaneous » surface in a paper, and through a « hide » nowhere at all — three registers where Portuguese changes nothing whatever.