Sport and training

The twenty-second entry is o ginásio, and it carries a piece of the ancient world that English owns several times over without noticing. Behind it stands Greek gymnasion, the place where young men trained, and behind that the verb gymnazein, to exercise, built on the adjective gymnos, naked — because that is how they trained. So the name of every room full of treadmills in Lisbon says, at bottom, the naked place. English took the word whole in its Latin shape, « gymnasium », and then shortened it in the mouth to « gym »; the same gymnos sits inside « gymnastics », and, a long way from any sport, inside « gymnosperm », the plant whose seed is naked because no fruit encloses it. What a reader has to take from this is the register. Portuguese uses o ginásio for exactly what English calls a gym — the place with the weights and the monthly fee — so Vou ao ginásio antes do trabalho is « I go to the gym before work », and not a visit to a school hall.