Company valuation

The twenty-first entry is o resultado normalizado, and the noun inside it has given English an idiom that left the ledger long ago. On a profit-and-loss account the figure that survives every deduction is printed last, and that position is its name: « the bottom line ». In a report the phrase is still literal, and « the bottom line improved » says that the profit did. Everywhere else it has become the ordinary way of announcing the only thing that counts — « the bottom line is that we cannot afford it » — where no account is in sight and nobody is adding anything up. Two neighbours come off the same page. « In the red » and « in the black » remember the two inks a bookkeeper once used, losses in red and everything else in black, and « to be in the black » needs explaining to nobody. Portuguese keeps o resultado for the figure and has to change words altogether for the other sense: o que interessa é que, no fim de contas. The arithmetic crosses between the two languages without losing anything; the idiom does not cross at all.