Industrial automation

El lazo cerrado mide, compara y corrige: the closed loop measures, compares and corrects. The loop — and el lazo is a single Spanish noun stretched over a set of English words with nothing in common between them. It is the control loop of this list, and any loop of rope or wire. It is the bow tied in a ribbon or a shoelace, which English calls a « bow » and never a loop. It is the lasso a rider throws — and that one made the journey back, because English took « lasso » from Spanish and left the other senses behind. And in the plural it is what holds people together: los lazos familiares are family ties. So a reader who has learnt « loop » for lazo has one sense out of four, and it happens to be the only one an engineer writing English will ever call a loop.