The colonial past

The second entry is o governo indireto, and the obvious English word for its first half is the wrong one. « Government » in English names a body of people: the ministers currently in office, the thing that falls and is replaced. O governo carries that sense too, but here it means the act of governing, and for that English keeps a separate noun. The settled term is « indirect rule », and « indirect government » reads as an unfinished translation. What repays attention is how far « rule » has been stretched. It is sovereignty, as in « under colonial rule ». It is a single prescription: a grammar has « rules » and so does a card game. It is the verb, both « to rule a country » and « to rule a line » across a page, which is where the last sense sits: « a ruler » is the person who governs and also the flat strip of wood in a pencil case. Nothing in o governo reaches any of that, because Portuguese hands the four jobs to four separate words: o domínio, a regra, governar and a régua. So o governo indireto is « indirect rule », and whoever writes « government » has kept the institution and lost the activity.