Dance

The nineteenth entry is a barra de ballet, the rail a dancer holds at the start of class, and Portuguese uses one plain noun for it, a barra. English writes the studio rail « barre » and keeps « bar » for everything else, and it is the everything else that repays a minute, because « bar » carries more fixed expressions than almost any short word we own. To « raise the bar » is to make a standard harder to meet, and it is now said of examiners and of athletes without anybody picturing a rail at all. « Behind bars » is in prison, and there the bars are the window. « Called to the Bar » is admitted to practise as a barrister, where the Bar is the rail that once divided the courtroom, and it takes a capital letter. And « bar none » means with no exception whatever: the best dancer in the company, bar none. Portuguese builds not one of these on a barra. It raises o nível, it puts somebody atrás das grades, and for the last of them it says sem exceção.