Hiking and mountain days

A third of the way down the list stands o cascalho, whose example is the sentence an English reader is likeliest to spoil while getting every word right. O cascalho solto desliza debaixo das botas says that loose broken stone slides underfoot, and Portuguese is content to leave it there: the same noun does the drive in front of a house, the slope below a crag and the bed a railway line is laid on. English has no general word for loose broken stone. It has four, and each one is fastened to a place rather than to the material. « Gravel » is the drive and the garden path. « Scree » is the mountainside, and the only one of the four that implies the stone will move under you, which is what this sentence reports. « Shingle » is the beach, where water has rounded everything. « Ballast » is the railway. Write that the loose gravel slides under your boots and nothing is false, yet the reader is now standing on a driveway. The Portuguese word carries no place inside it, so the place has to come out of the sentence around it.