Property law

The forty-third entry is a subida do preço após acordo, six words for something English does in one: « to gazump ». The seller has accepted an offer, the buyer has paid for a survey and a solicitor, and then a higher offer arrives and the seller takes it. English has a verb for exactly that sequence, it is heard in the passive far more often than the active — « we were gazumped twice » — and it carries the whole story at once: the earlier agreement, the money already spent on the strength of it, and the fact that nothing unlawful has happened. Two things follow for anybody translating. The word is opaque even to the people who use it, so the language keeps it whole and builds nothing on it beyond « gazumping ». And it has a mirror that catches readers out, « to gazunder », which is the buyer cutting the price at the last moment, same timing and opposite direction. Portuguese has no such verb and has to describe the movement, as this entry does, so what English gets in a syllable needs a clause going the other way round.