Hunting and game in Portuguese

The twenty-sixth entry is a época de caça, and its plain English equivalent, « open season », is one of the very few hunting terms that has walked out of the field and into the leader column. In Portuguese the phrase does nothing of the kind. A época de caça abre no outono states when shooting is lawful and stops there; the words keep their calendar and their statute, and nobody reaches for them to describe anything else. English kept that literal sense too, but grew a second one that is now commoner in a newspaper than the first: when we say it is open season on landlords, or on a minister who has stumbled, we mean that attacking them has become free of cost, that a restraint everybody had been observing has quietly been lifted. The picture underneath is exactly the Portuguese one — a stretch of the year in which something normally forbidden is allowed — and only the quarry has changed species. Worth noticing that the metaphor lives in one half of the pair alone. « Close season » has stayed in the game book, and so has o defeso.