Station, airport, border

The fortieth entry is a sala de embarque, and the English for it, the departure lounge, carries a noun that Portuguese has to translate three times over. « The lounge » is first of all a room in a house: in Britain it is the everyday word for the sitting room, the one with the television and the sofa, where Portuguese says a sala de estar. It is then a public room of the same kind, furnished for waiting rather than for eating — the lounge of a hotel, and the lounge bar of a pub, which is the quieter half with chairs in it. And it is the hall at an airport, the departure lounge, where nothing about is domestic and the word survives only because people are sitting down. What holds the three together is the verb. « To lounge » is to sit or lie about with no purpose, and it is older than any of the rooms: they were named after the posture, and not the other way round. So the English sign promises something a sala de embarque never claims: a place built for doing nothing until something happens.