The body and health

The fifteenth entry is a barriga, and the difficulty sits on the English side rather than the Portuguese one. Portuguese runs two words that never trade places. A barriga is the outside: the part that shows, that a belt goes round, that aches in dói-me a barriga. O estômago is the organ inside, the bag food arrives in, and outside a surgery almost nobody names it. English has both things and has let one word cover them. « Stomach » is the organ in an anatomy book, and « stomach » is also the whole front of a person in ordinary speech, which is why « I have a stomach ache » says nothing about the stomach and usually means something lower down. The other English words for the outside are all marked in some way: « belly » is blunt and faintly coarse, « tummy » is what is said to a child, « abdomen » belongs on a form. A barriga is none of those. It is the plain, neutral word an adult uses to a doctor without apology, and that neutrality is the thing a translation has to keep.