Translating and interpreting

The twelfth entry is a glosa marginal, and the noun that carries it began as a body part. Greek glôssa was the tongue, and from the tongue it came to mean the language spoken with it — the sense still standing in « polyglot » and in the « glossolalia » of the churches. Ancient scholars then narrowed it a third time. A glôssa was a word that had fallen out of use and needed explaining, an obscurity in an old poem that a reader could no longer be expected to know; and because such words were explained in the margin, the name slid off the hard word and onto the note beside it. That is the sense this entry uses, and o glossário, eight lines below, is the same root again: a whole book of such notes. English is in the odd position of owning two unrelated « gloss » words: this one, out of glôssa by way of Latin glossa, and the shine on a surface, which reached English from the Germanic north and has no connection with it at all. Portuguese never had to keep them apart: a glosa explains, and what shines is o brilho.