Screenplay and dramaturgy

The first entry is a premissa da história, and the English word beside it leads a second life that no logic book prepares anybody for. « A premise » is what a premissa is: the proposition set down before the conclusion, from the Latin praemissa, the things sent ahead, built on prae and mittere. Then the lawyers took it. In an old conveyance the opening section named the parties and described the land, and that section was called « the premises »; by an easy slide the word stopped naming the paragraph and began naming the property the paragraph described. That sense is now the loud one, and it is always plural. « No smoking on the premises », « the officers searched the premises », « licensed premises » — in every one of them the word means a building and the ground under it, and it has no singular at all. So number, rather than sense, tells the two apart: « on the premise that » introduces an assumption, « on the premises » says where somebody is standing. Portuguese keeps a premissa for the assumption alone, and for the building it says as instalações.