Work is proceeding apace on the new footway. It has been well-managed without too much disruption, except that it means a bit of a hike up the hill to the temporary bus stop – good for health perhaps, but not what you need at the end of a hard day.
The most welcome thing about it is that is seems to have been re-laid with some kind of porous paviors. Water no longer runs down when we have one of these heavy fownpours, & the surface of the newly re-laid side dries out noticeably more quickly than the old pavement on the other side of the road.
I was suddenly wondering whether I should have said permeable rather than porous. This led me to a dizzying tour of the dictionary, through perforated, penetrating, pervasive, porous, permeable & pervious, among others. The meanings overlap such that they may be largely interchangeable in ordinary (metaphorical) usage, though the differences may be important to scientists and engineers, such as in the following distinction from the 1937 book Ground Water by C. F. Tolman, quoted in the OED: An aquiclude is porous but not pervious to water moved by gravity.
I also found a very nice quotation from Nathanael Carpenter, a Church of England clergyman and philosopher & almost exact contemporary (1589–1628) of John Donne: The Porous and spongy nature of the Earth, which is apt to drinke in the water of the sea.
But I want to propose a new word for such footways: pavious.
