Digital life and data protection

The fourth entry is o armazenamento na nuvem, and the two halves of it have opposite histories. A nuvem comes straight down from Latin nubem and has meant a cloud for as long as there has been a language to say it in. « Cloud » has meant a cloud for only about seven hundred years. In Old English the word for what floats overhead was wolcen, which survives today in the poetic « welkin » and nowhere else at all. Clūd, the ancestor of « cloud », named something quite different: a mass of rock, a hill, a heavy lump of earth, and it belongs with « clod » and « clot », which still carry that sense of matter pressed together. The transfer happened in Middle English, on the strength of a likeness nobody has to be taught, because a bank of cumulus does look like a cliff. So the Portuguese word in this phrase has always been vapour, while the English one was a hill before it was ever weather. For a phrase that now names a warehouse full of hard disks, the older and heavier sense is arguably the more truthful of the two.