Learning to drive

The second entry is a licença de aprendizagem, and the long noun at the end of it rests on a verb English owns four times over without ever hearing it. Aprender continues Latin apprehendere, that is ad plus prehendere, to take hold of, to seize: what is learnt is what has been grasped, and the picture underneath is a hand closing. English borrowed the same verb again and again and put it everywhere but the classroom. « To apprehend » is what a constable does to a suspect and what a mind does to an idea; « apprehension » slid out of that second sense into dread, because to grasp what is coming is to fear it. « Comprehend » takes hold of the whole thing at once. « Prehensile » is said of a tail. And « apprentice » arrived through French from the very same root, so the boy in the workshop and the learner driver of this entry are named identically — except that English keeps « apprentice » for a trade and reaches for the Germanic « learn » everywhere else. Portuguese never needed that second word: aprender and a aprendizagem cover the lot.