Art history

The twenty-sixth entry is o ponto de fuga, and the two languages watched the same lines and named two different events. Portuguese names the flight: the lines run away and the point is where they flee to, which is what French, Spanish, Italian and German all say as well. English names the disappearance instead, « the vanishing point », and the word it chose has a history. « Vanish » is a borrowed verb with its head cut off: Old French esvanir, from Latin evanescere, came in and lost its first syllable on the way. That clipping is not a single accident but a habit, and several of the pairs are still in use side by side: « a squire » beside « an esquire », « a sample » beside « an example », « spite » beside « despite », « a fence » beside « a defence », « to mend » beside « to amend ». The long form stayed formal; the short one went to work. So a fuga keeps the whole of its word, while the English term for the same point is itself a word that vanished a little.