Horses and riding

The fourteenth entry is o exame veterinário, and the English wording that renders it carries a small piece of history. A horse offered for sale is looked over by a veterinary surgeon before any money changes hands, and a compra depende do exame veterinário describes exactly that morning. English shortened « veterinary surgeon » to « a vet » in the nineteenth century, and then did something a language rarely does with an abbreviation: it made a verb of it. To « vet » a horse was to have it examined by that man, and the verb soon kept the caution and dropped the animal. Today a newspaper vets a story, a ministry vets a candidate, a committee vets an application, and « vetting » is the whole procedure by which somebody is checked before being let near anything that matters. Not one of those speakers is thinking about hooves. The Portuguese wording has stayed where it started: o exame veterinário is the examination of an animal and nothing else, and for the office sense the language reaches for a verificação or a averiguação. Learn the noun here and an English verb comes with it.