Diving

The thirty-second entry is a boia de sinalização, and the word at its centre has had two very different careers. In Portuguese, a boia has stayed in the water: the moored marker, the float in a cistern, the ring a child wears round the waist. English kept all of that for « buoy » as a noun, and then took the thing out of the sea and made a verb of it, one about mood and money. Somebody is « buoyed by the result »; a side is « in buoyant mood »; a newspaper reports « buoyant demand » or « a buoyant housing market ». The image is exact and it always points upward: whatever is buoyed is being held up by something underneath it, and the word never means merely cheerful — it means cheerful because of something. Portuguese did not follow. For the mood it says animado, and for the thing that saves somebody at the last moment it reaches for a plank rather than a float: a tábua de salvação, where English would say « a lifeline ». So a boia renders « the buoy » and almost nothing else.