Moving house

The eighth entry is delicado, and it is the one adjective on this page an English reader will translate without stopping. The gloss says fragile, and on a packing crate that is exactly right: O conteúdo é delicado warns the two men carrying it that something inside will not survive a corner. « Delicate » does the same work with us, so far so good — except that nobody in Britain writes it on a box, where the word stencilled in capitals is « fragile ». The real distance appears the moment the adjective is turned on a person. Uma pessoa delicada is not somebody frail or easily upset. It is somebody courteous, careful of others, well brought up: it is the ordinary Portuguese word for polite, and its opposite, indelicado, is what you call a man who was rude to the removal crew. « Delicate » has never carried that sense — a « delicate » colleague is a fragile one, and calling a person delicate is closer to a diagnosis than a compliment. So one adjective covers the glass inside the crate and the manners of the man lifting it, and only half of it crosses over.