Sports medicine and training

The thirty-fifth entry is a ligadura funcional, and the noun inside it looks like a word English already owns. It is not. A ligadura is a bandage: the strip of cloth or elastic that goes round an ankle, sold in any chemist, wound on by anybody. The English lookalike, « a ligature », never does that job. It is the thread a surgeon ties round a vessel to stop it bleeding; it is the cord used in a strangling, which is why the word turns up in court reports; it is the joined pair of letters a printer casts as one sort; and it is the curved line that binds two notes in music. In every one of those something is tied off or tied together, and nothing is wrapped for support. So uma ligadura elástica is an elastic bandage, and the entry on this list, a ligadura funcional, is what a physiotherapist calls « taping » or « strapping »: a bandage laid along the line of the muscle so that the joint can still move. Both words come from Latin ligare, to tie, and only one of them still ties anything.