Light, colour, surface

The ninth entry is ofuscar, and English owns the word without being able to use it here. Both sides come from Late Latin offuscare, built on fuscus, dark: to put a shadow over something. Portuguese kept that at the level of light, and the sense it arrived at looks like the opposite only until one thinks about it: the quickest way to darken what somebody sees is to give them far too much of it — a neve ofusca quem não traz óculos escuros is snow doing exactly that, and a welding arc does it too. English borrowed the same verb straight out of the books and spent it entirely on words. « To obfuscate » now means to make an account deliberately hard to follow, and it is nearly always an accusation: a minister obfuscates, a contract obfuscates, and nothing anywhere is any brighter or darker for it. So the cognate is a trap in one direction only. Coming from Portuguese one has to change verb altogether — « to dazzle » for the snow, « to blind » for the headlamp — and keep « obfuscate » for the sentence that was written to be misread.