Collective wage bargaining

The seventeenth entry is a cláusula de abertura, the provision that lets a single firm step outside the agreement its whole branch has signed, and the noun at the front of it carries a small contradiction. « Clause » goes back to Latin clausula, the diminutive of clausa, from claudere, to shut: a little closing, nothing more. Roman teachers of rhetoric used the word for the cadence that brought a long sentence to rest, the last few syllables whose rhythm told a listener the thought was finished. From the end of a period it moved to a separate provision of a document, because that too is a unit that closes. So a cláusula de abertura is an opening made out of a shutting, and the paradox lies too deep for either language to feel it. What an English reader should notice instead is the second job « clause » has kept at home and Portuguese has given to another word entirely. A main clause and a relative clause belong to grammar, not to contract law; Portuguese calls those a oração principal and a oração relativa, and keeps a cláusula for the paper that gets signed.