Social security law

The thirty-sixth entry is a restituição de prestações pagas a mais, and the Portuguese is calm and legal: a giving back of what was paid over. The ordinary English for it is « to claw back », with the noun « the clawback ». Nothing in that image is gentle. To claw a thing back is to take it with the fingers hooked, from somebody who is holding on, and the phrase sits in a family where getting something again always costs a struggle: « to claw one’s way back », « to claw back a two-goal deficit ». Used of money it has become the term of art for an amount already handed over and then taken again: an overpaid benefit, a banker’s bonus, an allowance withdrawn through the tax system. Two things follow for anyone writing. The formal words do exist — « the recovery of an overpayment », « the repayment » — and a letter from an office will use them. But the word a newspaper prints is « clawback », and a reader who knows only the formal pair will not see that the two name one thing.