Debt and advice

The thirty-sixth entry is registo de incumprimento, and the Portuguese half of it is the transparent one. Cumprir is to carry out what was agreed, the prefix cancels it, and so ficou com registo de incumprimento no banco says that the bank has written down a promise not kept, and nothing more. The word an English reader meets on the same letter is « default », and it is the same word that sits on every settings screen. Those are not two words that happen to look alike. « Default » came into English from Old French defaute, a lack, built on faillir, to fail, from Latin fallere, and its oldest use here is the legal one: the party who does not appear in court, the borrower who does not pay. The sense every computer carries was laid on top of that much later and keeps the old logic intact, because the default is what holds when nobody does anything. Portuguese needs two unrelated words for the same ground, o incumprimento for the debt and a predefinição for the machine, so the quiet joke English makes is not open to it.