Radiotherapy

The fifteenth entry is a braquiterapia, and its first half is a Greek measurement that English readers regularly take the wrong way. The adjective behind it is brakhýs, short, and it survives in a small learned English family: « brachycephalic », a skull that is short from front to back, and « brachylogy », speech cut down to the fewest words. What it never means is short in time, and that is exactly the reading the term invites, as though the course were a quick one. It is not a measure of the calendar but of the gap between the source and the tissue. A braquiterapia is treatment at short range, which is what the example sentence says outright — a fonte fica dentro do corpo — so the radiation crosses a few millimetres instead of a room. The counterpart settles it, because it was built on the opposite Greek word: teletherapy, from têle, far, is the machine standing at a distance. One near neighbour is worth keeping apart, since English borrowed it too. Bradýs means slow and gives « bradycardia », and it has nothing whatever to do with this word.