The town and the way there

The fourteenth entry is banco, and it repays a stop, because both languages have packed two things into this one form — just not the same two. In Portuguese, o banco is the place that keeps your money, and it is also the bench in the park, the seat in a car, and, in a hospital, o banco de sangue. That pairing is not an accident. The money sense came into English, and into the rest of Europe, from the Italian banca, the counter or bench a money-changer worked at, so the seat is the older thing and Portuguese still keeps it in plain view. « Bank » in English pairs the money with something else entirely: the raised edge of a river, which reached the language by another road and which Portuguese calls a margem. The upshot is neatly symmetrical. An English speaker has to be told that senta-te no banco is about a bench, and a Portuguese speaker has to be told that a river has a bank at all.