Wildlife management

The nineteenth entry is o registo de atropelamentos, and the word English reaches for names the wrong half of it. Atropelar is an ordinary transitive verb and o atropelamento is the noun made from it, so Portuguese can name the event, date it and count it. English has no such noun. Its verb is « to run over », and nothing serviceable can be built on that, so the language named the aftermath instead and coined « roadkill », the animal lying there once the car has gone. Three consequences follow, and all three catch writers out. It is a mass noun, like « traffic » or « litter »: a survey speaks of « the amount of roadkill » on a stretch of road, never of « the roadkills ». It names a carcass rather than a deed, so nobody can be said to have committed one. And it has gone figurative — « political roadkill » is whoever was flattened by somebody else’s momentum — which is why the scientific literature avoids it and writes « wildlife-vehicle collisions » instead. O registo de atropelamentos is a register of events; a roadkill survey is a count of bodies.