Seafaring and the port

The twenty-first entry is o baixio, and it is worth a stop because English makes a muddle here that Portuguese never had. O baixio is built on baixo, low, and it says exactly what it is: a patch where the bottom comes up. Nothing else lives in the word. « Shoal » holds two words at once. The « shoal » a chart marks is an old adjective meaning shallow, from sceald; the « shoal » of herring comes from scolu, a troop or a crowd, and it is the same root that stands behind « school » when the school is made of dolphins. Two ancestors with nothing in common arrived at one spelling, so « shoal water » and « a shoal of mackerel » look like one word doing two jobs and are not. Portuguese keeps the two at arm’s length: the shallow is o baixio, the fish are o cardume, and no sentence can hesitate between them. Read A carta marca um baixio à entrada and you may be sure there is nothing alive in it.