Watchmaking

A mechanical watch is a spring being let go very slowly, and every word in this list belongs either to the letting go or to the slowing down. Twenty places in comes el chaflán pulido a mano, the hand-polished bevel along the edge of a bridge — the finish that takes the longest and is seen the least. El chaflán is a cut across a right angle, and Spanish applies it at two scales that could not be further apart. On a watch bridge it is a bevel the width of a hair. In a city it is the corner of a block sliced off at forty-five degrees so that a cart could turn — the pattern the Eixample of Barcelona is built on, where quedamos en el chaflán is an ordinary way to arrange a meeting. English has « bevel » and « chamfer » for the first, and nothing at all for the second; it has to describe it.