The fashion industry

The first entry is o painel de inspiração, and the English name for it, « a mood board », rests on a word that is really two words sharing one spelling. The first is native. Old English mōd meant the mind, the heart, the spirit somebody brought to a thing, and it is still audible in « moody », in « in no mood for it » and in the board of this entry, which collects a feeling before it collects a colour. The second came out of the schoolroom. When grammarians needed a name for the indicative, the subjunctive and the imperative they took « mode », from Latin modus, a measure or a manner; the spelling drifted onto the older word, and the two became indistinguishable on the page. So the mood of a designer’s board and the mood of a verb have no common ancestor whatever. Portuguese never let them meet: o modo carries the grammar and the manner, o humor and a disposição carry the feeling, and a inspiração is what the board is for. A reader who renders « mood » here by o modo has filed a wall of photographs under grammar.