Sanitary engineering in Portuguese

The twenty-third entry is a proteção contra queimaduras, and English cannot carry the noun across with one word, because it keeps two where Portuguese keeps one. « A burn » is what dry heat does: a flame, a hotplate, an iron, the sun. « A scald » is what hot water or steam does, and it is a full word with a verb and a participle of its own, « to scald », « scalded », « scalding ». Everything this page is about belongs to the second. A tap that sends out water hot enough to injure scalds somebody; it does not burn them. So the fitting is « an anti-scald valve », the injury written in the record is « a scald », and the notice on the wall of a care home reads « risk of scalding ». The split is not medical fussiness but ordinary usage, and it reaches the kitchen too, where milk is scalded and never burnt when it is taken just short of the boil. Portuguese covers the whole field with a queimadura and lets the sentence say what did the damage.