Joinery and furniture making

The tenth entry is o travessão de topo, and English names it after a kitchen utensil: « the breadboard end », the strip of wood fixed across the end of a tabletop so that the end grain is covered and the top can still move as it pleases. The name is honest, because the strip looks exactly like the board a loaf is cut on. What a reader coming from Portuguese cannot guess is where else that homely object has gone. In electronics, « a breadboard » is the plastic block full of small holes into which a circuit is pushed together without any soldering, and almost every beginner builds a first circuit on one. The two trades share nothing but a picture, and the picture is literal: the earliest experimenters really did nail their components to a wooden board of the kind kept for bread, and the name outlived the wood. Portuguese has no such thread running between the workshop and the laboratory, so the word has to be met twice, once in each room, and neither meeting prepares anybody for the other.