Environment and energy

Entry sixteen is o vidrão, and the two languages named the same container from opposite ends. Portuguese named it after what goes in: o vidro is glass, and the ending is the one this language reaches for when a thing is large. The whole set on the street corner works that way — the blue one beside it is o papelão, for paper — so a reader who knows the material knows the bin. English did something stranger. It borrowed a word from money and called the thing « a bottle bank », putting glass where savings would be, and then kept going: « a blood bank », « a food bank », « a seed bank », « a data bank ». The image is of a place where something is deposited and held until it is wanted, which is exactly right for blood and for seeds and exactly wrong here, because nobody ever withdraws a bottle. Two notes for writing it. The word stands alone on a British sign, never as « a bottle container ». And it is countable: three bottle banks, one on each corner.