Training and competition in Portuguese

The thirty-first entry is aplaudir, and the gloss gives it two jobs that English hands to different words. Indoors the two languages agree: an audience aplaude and an audience applauds, and the hands do the work. The sentence on this page is not indoors. A bancada aplaudiu até ao apito final describes a stand of people on their feet making a noise for ninety minutes, and « the stand applauded until the final whistle » moves a concert hall into a football ground. English shares that noise out among three verbs. « To clap » is the hands and nothing else, with no opinion in it. « To applaud » is the hands plus approval, and it has drifted formal enough that a match report steps around it. « To cheer » is the voice, and it is the word a crowd gets. Where the two languages meet again is away from any noise at all: aplaudo a decisão is « I applaud the decision », and both of them mean approval and no hands. So aplaudir asks to be read twice: once for what the body is doing, once for what the speaker thinks.