Migration and society

The eighteenth entry is a falta de mão de obra, and both languages measure work by the hand — but they do very different things with it. A mão de obra is the hand of the work, an abstract quantity: it can be counted, costed and brought in from abroad, and it can never be one person. Nobody points at a bricklayer and calls him uma mão de obra. English went the other way and let the hand stand for the whole man. « A farm hand », « a deck hand », « all hands on deck », « factory hands » in a Victorian report: in each of them the hand is somebody who can be greeted by name. That is why English has to change register halfway. A falta de mão de obra fechou a fábrica mais cedo is « the labour shortage closed the factory early » in the newspaper and « they were short-handed » in the canteen, and no single English noun carries both. The abstractions that could — « labour », « manpower », « the workforce » — refuse a plural, exactly as a mão de obra does.