bremso

The last word of the band, and a plain one: bremso is the brake. The verb is bremsi, to brake or to slow something down, and it works figuratively too - bremsi la inflacion, to put the brakes on inflation.

It comes from German Bremse, which is a small pleasure of a word. Before it meant the thing on a wheel it meant a clamp fitted to a horse's nose to hold the animal still while it was shod. The mechanism changed, the job did not. German has a second, unrelated Bremse meaning a horsefly, and Esperanto took only the useful one.

This completes the motoring set the course has been assembling across three chapters: aŭto at 1001, veturilo the vehicle, rado the wheel, motoro the engine, benzino the petrol at 2201, garaĝo the garage at 2326 from this chapter's sibling band, and now the brakes. Which is more or less a car, and by the standard of a language whose critics say it cannot handle the modern world, assembled entirely out of ordinary international roots with no special pleading anywhere.