Road construction

The eleventh entry is a formação de rodeiras, and the noun inside it is assembled in front of the reader: a roda is the wheel, and a rodeira is the groove a wheel wears into a surface. Nothing more is asked of it. English calls the same groove « a rut », a word that gives away nothing about wheels, and then does something Portuguese never did with its own: it lifts the groove out of the road and puts a life inside it. To be « in a rut » is to go on doing the same thing because the sides are too high to climb out of, and « stuck in a rut » is said of a job, a marriage or a Tuesday. The picture is exact, which is probably why nobody hears the tarmac in it any more. A rodeira carries none of that. Somebody whose weeks have flattened out says cair na rotina, or andar sempre na mesma, and the road keeps its ruts to itself. There is a second « rut » in English as well, unrelated and spelt the same way: the deer’s mating season.