Meetings and committees

The ninth entry is as justificações de ausência, and it is the one line of an agenda where English stops describing and reaches for a formula. A justificação is a justification, a reason put forward, so the Portuguese says plainly what the item holds — the reasons the absent members have sent in. A British agenda writes something else. Item one, on almost every set of papers a club, a charity, a school governing body or a professional committee produces, is the single word « Apologies », or at greater length « Apologies for absence ». Nothing is being apologised for in the ordinary sense. Nobody has done wrong, nobody is contrite, and the word has kept none of its regret — it has hardened into the name of a list, and it behaves like any other countable thing in committee speech. « We have three apologies », « her apologies were received », « to send apologies »: each of those is neutral administration. The distance matters going the other way too, because « justifications for absence » printed on a British agenda would read as though attendance had quietly become a disciplinary matter.