Free time and sport

Second on this list is o passatempo, and English keeps two words where Portuguese keeps one. The exact match exists: « pastime » is built from « pass » and « time » exactly as passatempo is built from passar and tempo, and it was assembled in the fifteenth century on the model of the French passe-temps. But « pastime » has drifted faintly formal, and almost nobody uses it of themselves. The word an English speaker actually reaches for is « hobby », and a hobby was once a small horse. The name goes back to Hobin, an old pet form of Robin given to horses; from the animal came the child’s hobby-horse, the stick with a head on it; and from riding that came the picture of a grown man on his hobby-horse, going on and on about the one subject that interested him. What is left of all that is the word on every form. So O meu passatempo é a fotografia is « my hobby is photography », and the literal rendering, right in every particle, reads like a school essay.