Respiratory medicine

The nineteenth entry is a medicação de recurso, and the two languages name the same inhaler from opposite ends. O recurso is what is left once the ordinary arrangement has not held — um plano de recurso is a fallback, em último recurso is as a last resort — so the medicine is named by its position in the plan: the one held back for the day the rest of it fails. English names the same thing by what it is meant to do for the person holding it. In a British chest clinic the blue inhaler is « a reliever » and the brown one « a preventer », two agent nouns carrying the whole description, and what a patient keeps at home for a flare-up is « a rescue pack ». The habit runs through the vocabulary — « a rescue inhaler », « rescue medication », « rescue breaths » — and none of it summons an ambulance. Nothing in the Portuguese term promises a rescue, and nothing in the English one says where the medicine stands in the plan. Each language leaves out precisely what the other thinks worth saying.