Cranes and materials handling

The eighteenth entry is a elevação em tandem, two cranes on one load, and the word in the middle is a Latin adverb that reached this page by way of a joke. Tandem in Latin means at length, at last, and it is about time and nothing else: tandem aliquando, at long last. Towards the end of the eighteenth century English university slang took that temporal phrase and read it as though it were spatial — at length, lengthwise — and pinned it on a carriage whose two horses were harnessed one behind the other instead of side by side. The pun stuck, the horses went, and the shape stayed: a tandem bicycle seats its riders one behind the other, and « in tandem » now means two things working together, whatever their arrangement. That last shift is the one a reader of em tandem has to watch, because the crane sense has followed it: the two machines stand side by side, not one behind the other, and all they really share is the load. So the word says lengthwise, the Latin said finally, and the lift means jointly.