Palaeontology

The eighteenth entry is o fóssil vivo, and the English phrase that renders it word for word, « a living fossil », carries a second life that will ambush anyone who drops it into ordinary prose. It began as a technical description: Darwin put it into print in 1859 for the few survivors that had changed very little while their relatives disappeared, and palaeontology has kept it, uneasily, ever since. What English did with it outside the laboratory is what matters here. « A living fossil » is now said far more often of a person, and it is never kind: the minister who has outlasted three governments, the professor who still dictates, the shop that will not take a card. It means out of date, comically so, and unaware of it. The Portuguese phrase carries none of that and stays on the specimen. So Chamar-lhe fóssil vivo esconde tudo o que mudou is a remark about biology, while « calling him a living fossil » is a remark about a man. If an animal is meant, the sentence around it has to say so, or the reader will hear the joke instead of the creature.