Water and wastewater

The twenty-seventh entry is o escoamento superficial, and what is worth taking from it is the shape of the English word rather than its meaning. Portuguese builds these trade nouns the way it builds most nouns: it keeps the verb whole and hangs a suffix on it, so escoar gives o escoamento, captar gives a captação and drenar gives a drenagem. English does something else. It takes a verb and a bare particle and welds the two into one noun, and the particle may end up on either side: « run-off » from « to run off », « the overflow » from « to overflow », « the intake » from « to take in », and beside them « the outfall » and « the backwash ». One thing never moves. The noun is stressed on its first element while the verb behind it is stressed on the particle, which is how a listener tells the two apart. On spelling, British writing keeps the hyphen in « run-off »; American writing prints it solid. Meet any such pair and read it as a verb plus a particle: what runs off, what is taken in.