Typography and printing

Entry twenty-eight is a medianiz, the blank where two facing pages meet, and the English word for it is « the gutter ». Nothing else on this list makes an English reader stop quite like that, because « gutter » is otherwise a drain: the channel along the edge of a roof, the one at the kerb that fills in a storm, the trough down each side of a bowling lane. It carries a moral charge as well. A paper that lives on scandal is « the gutter press », and somebody who has climbed out of poverty is said to have come « from the gutter ». None of that belongs anywhere near a book, and yet the printing sense is plain enough once it is drawn: an open book, looked at down its spine, really does show a trough, and the text falls away on both sides of it. Portuguese took the other view and named the same blank from the middle, which is what the sentence here describes: A medianiz separa as duas páginas abertas. One language sees a channel for water, the other the line running down the centre of the sheet.