A language course abroad

The first entry on this page is a escola de línguas, and the noun inside it is the very word English writes as « school », taken from a language that meant something unexpected by it. Greek skholē was spare time: the hours a free man did not have to give to necessary work. Because those were the hours the philosophers used for argument, the word moved along a chain one step at a time — from the free time, to the discussion held in it, to the group that gathered for the discussion, and finally to the room where the group met. Latin borrowed the last of those senses as schola, and out of schola come a escola, escolar and a escolaridade on one side, and « school », « scholar » and « scholastic » on the other. Nothing in the modern noun remembers the leisure, with a single exception: « scholar » still describes a person defined by having the time. Anyone booking o curso intensivo further down the list may take what comfort there is in knowing that the word started out promising the opposite.