Opinion and discussion in Portuguese

The twenty-seventh entry is reparar em, and an English reader has usually gone wrong before reaching the end of the line, because the verb is « repair » letter for letter and mending is the one job it is not doing here. Reparei em pormenores que ninguém viu says: I noticed details that nobody else saw. Portuguese did keep the workshop sense — reparar um carro is to repair a car, and a reparação is the repair — but the everyday verb for getting a thing mended is arranjar, so what a reader actually meets, again and again, is this second life: to catch sight of, to take note of. The preposition marks the difference and is not decoration. Reparar with a direct object mends; reparar em plus a thing notices it; and before a clause the em simply falls away, as in reparei que estavas calado. The noun has followed the verb across: um reparo is not a repair at all but a remark, usually a critical one, so fez-me um reparo means somebody pulled me up. Both halves descend from Latin reparare, to restore. English stayed in the workshop; Portuguese also went to the eye.