Media and the News

The seventeenth entry is a emissão, and the two languages reach the same thing across quite different ground. Emissão is Latin throughout: emittere, to send out, the root under emitir and under English « emit ». Nothing surprising there. What is worth knowing is that « broadcast », the word a British reader will reach for on every line of this page, began on a farm. « Cast » is thrown and « broad » is wide, and to sow broadcast was to scatter seed by hand across a field instead of drilling it in rows. It was an ordinary agricultural term for a century before anybody had a transmitter, and it was handed to radio in the nineteen-twenties, where the picture still holds: one sower, seed thrown wide, no telling where any of it lands. Two things follow for writing. The past keeps the old shape — a programme was broadcast, never broadcasted. And « emission » did not follow the word across: in English it belongs to gases, light and radiation, so a emissão foi interrompida is the broadcast was interrupted, and never the emission.