Patudo

Here’s another nugget from social media. I saw a meme on Instagram about depressed animals which, unfortunately, I can’t really reproduce here because it had someone’s user name in it, but no worries: the interesting bit was off to one side, where a sad-looking moorhen was thinking “As outras aves chamaram me patudo. Body shaming é tão 90s”

What were they saying to body-shame the poor moorhen? Well, my first thought was that pato means “duck” so maybe patudo is like an exaggerated form of that word, meaning something like “big duck” or “fat duck”. But I looked it up and after an initial double-take when I saw that there is a kind of tuna called a patudo, I saw what was really happening. The root of patudo isn’t from “pato”, it’s from “pata”. It means big-footed. And it’s true, moorhens really do have massive feet for wading through the bogs. Poor moorhen! Coitadinha de gallinula!