Interface and data protection in Portuguese

The sixteenth entry is o botão de opção, and the sentence beside it — Só um botão de opção pode ficar ativo — is the whole definition of the thing. English does not define it at all. It calls the control a « radio button », and hardly anyone who says the phrase still sees the picture inside it: the row of preset buttons on an old car radio, where pushing one in popped every other one out, because the linkage behind the panel let exactly one stand at a time. That interlock is the entire meaning of the control, and English kept it as a souvenir of a dashboard rather than as a description. Portuguese named the function instead — a opção, one choice among several — and says out loud what the English term only remembers. The difference runs both ways. A Portuguese reader meeting « radio button » hunts for something to do with sound and finds nothing; an English reader meeting o botão de opção understands it at once, but loses the detail the older name still carries, that the exclusivity sits in the mechanism and is not left to the user’s good manners.