Obscure Vocabulary Break!
What the heck is a “Tanas”? Well, as it happens, that’s the wrong question. The word does exist and it means a sort of useless, indecisive person, but “O tanas” is also an exclamation indicating disagreement or disbelief, so something like “That’s what you think” or “No way!”, or, of you’re in a hurry, “Bollocks!”
It seems to hardly appear online. Priberam defines it but Linguee doesn’t know about it at all, so I’d say probably not one to whip out in the supermarket.
Shamelessly just doing my homework on here because I am short of time and shorter of ideas: synonyms from a passage from “Casa do Beco das Sardinheiras”, whose author, Mário de Carvalho seems like someone who likes to use interesting words, making him a challenging read.
I’m going to go above and beyond and do everything that I don’t already know, or am a bit vague about. If the word has multiple meanings I’ll use the one i think is closest to the original meaning in the text.
(Update – Quite a few corrections…)
Farejar => Caçar pelo olfato
Precaver-se => Ter cuidado
Precatar => Acautelar
Gaiato => Miúdo
Tareco => Traste, objeto de pouco valor (e também pode ser um gato doméstico, informalmente)
Eriçado => Levantado, ouriçado
Patorra => Pata grande
Avantajar => Ultrapassar
Surdir => Emergir
Poiso => Esconderijo
Escanifobético => Esquisito
Lá ser é => Isso é verdade
Taludo => Robusto (Pode ser “gordo” também, mas no fundo da página 61, a mulher do chefe da família diz “lá que o Gigas está magrinho par o tamanho)
Alforria => Libertação
Amarrotar => Amachucar
Alvoroço => Agitação
Estraçalhado => Despedaçado
Fera => Criatura feroz
Medonho => Terrível
Algazarra => Tumulto
Arribar => Chegar
Agastar-se => Ficar irritado
Temo-la armada => Vamos ter problemas
Para Cascos de Rolha => Para um lugar afastadíssimo
Notívago => Noturno
Espavento => Assombrado
Prontos! => Combinado!
Quite => Desobrigado *
Lamúria => Lamento
Polícias de Giro => Polícias que andam a pé?**
Botar => Lançar para fora***
Amanhar-se => Adaptar-se
*interesting one, this. It’s plural in the passage: “quites” and I thought it was borrowed from English, like “we’ll call it quits”. It seems not. There must be some common ancestry there though, because it’s too specific to be a coincidence. It’s quite a hard one to come up with a synonym. I’ve gone with Desobrigado but we’re really looking at an “I have now scratched your back after you scratched mine and further backacratching is no longer required”
**Esta frase é poço usada e existe um “Grupamento de Intervenção Rápida Ostensiva” (GIRO) no Brasil mas acho que não tem nada a ver com isto.
*** Os significados desta palavra são muitos e fazem parte nesta canção humorística. “A bota a gente calça e a calça a gente bota” (TW: Brazilian Portuguese)
Writing this lot out so I remember it.
Niche point about the difference between planning to do a thing and intending to do a thing. I recently had an exercise to paraphrase the following snippet
“visa colocar o país”
It’s obviously not a full sentence so it’s a little difficult to do. “Visa” here doesn’t mean a visa you use to get into a country, it’s part of “visar”, which means “aim”, either literally (aiming a weapon) or in the sense of intending or having an objective.
So a good translation would be something like “intends to put the country” (in the original, it was followed by something like “…on a path toward sporting success”). Well, I suppose I was thinking something like that needs a long term strategy, or, if you like, a plan, so the word I used in place of “visa” was “planeia”. That’s not precise enough though. Planear is about the journey to get to your objective, and visar is more to do with your intention.
Better synonyms of visar would have been “pretender”, “tencionar” or “objetivar”
I also had to come up with a synonym for “o papel absorvente”. You’re obviously supposed to think of aborbent paper like kitchen towel (as opposed to papel higiénico, which is toilet paper), but it’s a trick! Papel can also mean “role”, and in the context “a escola assume um papel muito absorvente na vida deles” (from here) it was saying that school occupied a role in their lives that absorbed a lot of their attention and free time.
I said something about “estado social” intending to say “social status”, but it means “social state”. The word for status is actually “status”, which is weird becuse you don’t get many words in portuguese that start with st-. But there you have it: status social.
I knew “equipe” was a “francesismo”*, but I was a bit thrown by seeing it used in the wild so I looked up both equipe and equipa in Priberam. The lexicographers haven’t really been very helpful in explaining it, but the TL;DR is that yes, equipa is the preferred spelling. It’s just that the frenchified version is allowed and is sometimes used. I suppose it’s like cafe/café in english. É doesn’t really exist in our alphabet, so cafe is the closest standard english spelling but nobody is going to have an aneurism if you bust out an accent.
Homem Rico vs Rico Homem; Velha Casa vs Casa Velha
Um rico homem seems to mean “a good/valued man” as opposed to just a rich man. It’s the eighth definition on Priberam, although they use it for netos rather than homens. A question on Wordreference Forums refers to a blog (sarcastically?) asking of José Socrates is “um rico homem ou um homem rico” but I can’t find the original.
There’s also an old-fashioned expression “rico-homem“. with a hyphen, which seems to mean a member of the nobility.
Velha casa seems to be more deprecative, meaning outmoded or old fashioned, as opposed to simply old. This meaning of velho is the fourth one in Priberam, but they use it with technology rather than houses. My sense is that this one isn’t as clear-cut. I don’t see many references or explainers, and it’s translated all sorts of ways in Linguee.
*Which sounds like it should mean “earthquake in Paris” but actually just means a word or phrase borrowed from french, just like anglicismo means a word or phrase borrowed from english.
I’m still watching videos from the occasionally excellent improv music show, Canta-me Uma História.
One of the things they often say during the live shows is “Não Mandem Bocas”. It’s used in the theme song and in the host’s t-shirt. So what does it mean? Don’t send mouths? Eh?
A boca, in this context, is a criticism. Specifically, a low-effort, smartarse remark. It’s the eleventh definition on Priberam – “comentário provocatório ou crítico”. So basically, a heckle. The audience has access to a big screen at the back of the stage and they can use it for requests and messages, so it seems they have a rule not to spoil the vibe by shit-talking the performers while they’re half way through some parody number they’ve written.
Porquinho Mealheiro – a money box in the shape of a piglet. A piggy bank in other words. In fact, mealheiro on its own seems to show piggy banks if you google it, but there are definitely some other shapes there. Here’s Fátima Lopes talking about Moneyboxes in her lifestyle website a couple of years ago and as you can see she’s gone with a porquinho motif even though she doesn’t mention the word.
Here’s a little detail I spotted in o Mangusto. The pupils in this PE class refer to their teachers as stôr and stôra. I thought it seemed weird as an abbreviation for professor(a), because where does the t come from, but apparently it is short for “Senhor(a) Doutor(a)”
I still have to reach for the dictionary a fair bit, especially when reading something high-brow, but it’s not often I hit a sentence that has four unknown words in it.
Não se lembrava ela de lhe ter visto os dentes, mas recorda-lhe as mãos gorilentas, as calças de seriguilha descaídas no ventre e em cujo cós deve estar enfiada uma podoa em jeito de faca recurva.
Check this out.
Gorilenta isn’t even in the dictionary but I think I can guess it…
She didn’t remember having seen his teeth but she remembered his gorilla-like hands, the trousers of rough wool, sagging in the belly, and in whose waistband is stuck a pruning shear in the form of a curved knife.
Ooof!
Ooh, well I haven’t done a post about cool stuff words found on twitter for a while, but here’s one
It’s such an unusual-looking word, I wondered if it was a joke word – maybe 3 words stuck together for effect or something – but it’s not.
Here’s what Priberam has to say about it
arcaboiço
(ar·ca·boi·ço)
nome masculino1. Conjunto dos ossos de um vertebrado. = OSSATURA
2. Estrutura óssea do peito. = TÓRAX
3. [Por extensão] Constituição física.
4. [Técnica] Estrutura de madeira de uma construção. = ARMAÇÃO, MADEIRAMENTO
5. Traçado inicial de algo. = DELINEAMENTO, ESBOÇO
6. [Figurado] Capacidade, envergadura (ex.: o técnico não tem arcaboiço para substituir o treinador).
“arcaboiço”, in Dicionário Priberam da Língua Portuguesa [em linha], 2008-2023, https://dicionario.priberam.org/arcaboi%C3%A7o.
So it’s like “bone structure”, but focused on bodily articulation, as distinct from, say, facial bone structure. Nice!
I did the compreensão da leitura test from the DAPLE (C1) exam yesterday. It’s the one available on the Universidade de Lisboa site at the bottom of the course description here. I did pretty well on most of it but the wheels really came off on the last exercise so I’m going through the answers and trying to work out why it is the way it is.
Complete o texto com as palavras que faltam nos espaços 1-20. A cada espaço corresponde apenas uma palavra. Escreva as palavras na folha de respostas.
André Nave, Diogo Madeira e Bruno Nunes são três amigos que lançaram em novembro passado um sítio na Internet [1] podemos conhecer sugestões diversas sobre a cidade de Lisboa.
O sítio, chamado Onde Lisboa, [2] recordes de popularidade. A ideia surgiu quando os
três amigos [3] a necessidade de criar um espaço virtual onde os estudantes, os
residentes e os turistas pudessem encontrar informação que não [4] dos guias turísticos, por exemplo a questão do estacionamento gratuito.
O sítio dispõe de um separador [5] exclusivamente aos estudantes. Desde locais para
fazer impressões à lista de cantinas [6], os estudantes conseguem aceder a um conjunto de informações úteis em qualquer situação. [7] além disso, há um espaço dedicado ao desporto, à cultura e ao comércio.
O André e o Diogo fazem pesquisa de campo, sendo responsáveis pela [8] de informação e de fotografias que ilustram os artigos. Acabam [9] envolver os amigos nesse processo e estão sempre disponíveis para aceitar sugestões de [10] visita o sítio. Bruno Nunes diz que é comum encontrar espaços que não se [11] referenciados na Internet.
Nesses casos, o Onde Lisboa passa a [12] uma referência na divulgação desses espaços. À [13] que os proprietários do sítio vão fazendo pesquisas, vão descobrindo [14] vez mais coisas e aí constroem novos conteúdos.
O projeto está em permanente autoavaliação e os três amigos não sabem, ainda, [15]
proporções o projeto poderá atingir. [16] que vamos ter, em breve, um Onde Porto ou um Onde Coimbra? O tempo o [17].
Para já, Bruno, Diogo e André, os três mentores desta ideia já considerada genial, [18] as suas atividades profissionais com este projeto. Não têm uma ambição desmedida para o projeto e preferem que ele [19] crescendo aos poucos. Afinal, Roma e Pavia não se fizeram num dia. E é melhor [20] pelo seguro, para não dar razão ao ditado popular “quem tudo quer tudo perde”.
So I was at the banana museum, admiring the many curved fruits, when I noticed a chart displaying “O Valor Nutritiva do Banana”, listing the amount of fat, sugar, fibre and so on. I neglected to get a picture of it, but you can see it at the very bottom of this page.
So um… What? Why would cinzas (ashes) be in a banana? I puzzled it out and decided it means “potassium”. OK, OK, hear me out. We were in a museum so it seemed at least possible that the tabke was very old. When potassium was first discovered it wasnt really understood but it was known to be alkaline and to be present in ashes. In fact the name “potassium” comes from “potash”, a compound derived from wood ashes. So maybe at some point along the timeline people knew that this unidentified stuff was in a banana but they hadn’t got around to giving it a name yet.
Apparently, I was overthinking it. Cinzas, when it appears in a nutritional chart, jusy refers to the literal ashes or unburned inorganic residue left over when the food has been dried and the fats etc burned off. They can be analysed to figure out what minerals are in there but for some reason, that hadn’t been done by whoever made this table so they have just aggregated the potassium, sodium, calcium, magnesium, etc into one item: cinzas.
Luso 