Shopping online

The fifteenth entry is a etiqueta de devolução, and the first noun is a word English owns twice without noticing. Old French had estiquette, a little note stuck or pinned to something, built on a verb estiquier, to fix or to stick, which the language had taken in turn from a Germanic root. English borrowed it early and wore it down to « ticket », the slip of paper a traveller or a shopper carries. Centuries later it borrowed the very same word again, this time unchanged and by way of the court, where the little notice pinned up told visitors how to behave — and that second borrowing is « etiquette », the rules themselves rather than the paper they were written on. Portuguese did none of that splitting. A etiqueta is the label sewn into a jumper, the sticker carrying the price, the tag a returns parcel cannot travel without — and it is the code of manners as well, exactly as in « etiquette ». So the advice runs against the spelling: on a shopping page, etiqueta is a printed piece of paper, not good behaviour.