Immune system and infection

The twenty-seventh entry is a compatibilidade de tecidos, and the noun at the end is one an English reader will translate correctly and still only half understand. O tecido is the past participle of tecer, to weave, from the Latin texere, and it names anything that has been woven. In a hospital that is body tissue. In a shop it is cloth: um tecido de algodão is a cotton fabric, a loja de tecidos sells material by the metre, and nobody feels a jump between the two. English owns the very same word, taken from Old French tissu, itself a thing woven, but it has spent it almost entirely on the body. Cloth went to « fabric », to « material » and to « cloth » itself, and the weave survives in one everyday phrase only, « a tissue of lies » — a story whose strands are crossed over one another until it holds together. So this entry needs two different English words depending on the room, while the Portuguese one quietly keeps reminding its reader that an organ and a shirt are made the same way.