Hiring a tradesman

The twenty-second entry is a lista de defeitos, and the obvious rendering — « a list of defects » — would be understood on a British site but never used. The word is « snagging ». « A snag » began as something that catches: a stump left standing in a river, a jagged end that tears a sleeve, and from there anything that quietly stops a thing running smoothly. The building trade took the noun, made a verb of it, and grew a vocabulary on top. « To snag a house » is to walk through it writing down every mark, gap and door that sticks; « the snagging list » is what that walk produces; « the snagging period » is the time the builder has to work through it; and « snagging works » is the line on the account. Outside the trade the same noun survives in one phrase everybody uses — « to hit a snag », to run into the small unforeseen obstacle that holds the rest up. The register is worth hearing: a lista de defeitos sounds like a complaint, « the snagging list » like a stage of the job.