And then we have people who still say a hard disk (disco rígido in Portuguese) is a winchester, mistakenly call a computer case the CPU, pronounce default as “defuh”… IT is sure a no-man’s land when it comes to misusing English words!

One interesting, if controversial, case, though, is the neologism deletar after the verb delete, just as plugar from plug: Although the verbs do not originally exist in Portuguese, their meanings became so widely used and understood that one often doesn’t realize they do not belong to the Brazilian lexicon. Which only goes to show the dynamic nature of spoken language, and that change is an inevitable process, regardless of what the most linguistically-puritan people have to say. Houaiss dictionary already lists both verbs, tracing their entrance into Portuguese to the 70’s, but only points out that plugar should be avoided since there are other equivalents in the language, as if apagar or suprimir didn’t take care of that meaning just as well.

When I was working in Sao Paulo, I wrote a little article for New Routes magazine #15 including a false friends domino game. I wonder if it’s still available? You might need to be a subscriber to the publisher DISAL perhaps.

By the way, some of the Portuguese words that always tripped me up were the ‘guarda-’ words – which quite frequently saw me asking for a wardrobe when it was raining ….

cheers from faraway New Zealand,

Martin

Tks for the comment, but native from where? New Zealand? Nigeria? India? UK? US? Australia? Guiana? Falkland Islands? Or somewhere else (English is spoken in so many countries)? Each one of these places have their own “flavours” (or “flavors”) of English. Which one do you prefer?

Yeah, we Brazilians are creativy people but we can’t forget to study hard to speak as close as native speakers. I think English has become what Esperanto couldn’t.

Great article. Thanks Macmillan for the opportunity.

This is Aulete’s original entry:

Condescendente
adj. || que usa de condescendência; que denota condescendência: Recuara diante das pretensões dela o caráter bondoso e condescendente do cavalheiresco D. Afonso V. (Arnaldo Gama, Filho do Baldaia, c. 20, p. 502, ed. 1886.) F. lat. Condescendens.

The real Aulete is a reliable dictionary. The “update” job some people have been doing on it is sloppy and has no quotations.

If you still insist, please, bring me a couple of quotations from reliable sources and I will apologize for being wrong. Wrong translations and fabricated entries cannot be used as authoritative reference. So I insist: please, bring me quotations of Brazilian reliable authors.

One excellent and recent dictionary is also “Dicionário de Usos do Português do Brasil”, by Francisco S. Borba, Editora Ática, and it does not have “condescendente” with the meaning you want it to have.

Thanks in advance. There will be no more replies about “condescendente” before somebody brings some quotations originally in Portuguese.

P.S.: I wish Brazilians loved our Portuguese language as much as they love English. A good command of our mother tongue (and this goes for anyone’s mother tongue) is a “sine qua non” requisite to having a good command of any other language.

I’m sorry Jussara, but to say that dictionaries like Caldas Aulete and Houaiss are sloppy is a little over the top.