Business and the economy

The fourth entry is o prejuízo, and it is the word on this page a reader of English will get wrong while feeling sure. It is not « prejudice ». O prejuízo do trimestre é limitado says that the loss for the quarter is limited, and there is no opinion anywhere in it. Both words descend from Latin praeiudicium, a judgement passed before the matter has been heard, and each language kept a different half. English kept the judging and moved it inside the head, so that a prejudice is now an opinion held in advance of the evidence. Portuguese kept the consequence — the harm such a judgement does — and let it widen to harm of any kind, money included, so that a firm that teve prejuízo has simply lost money. The older English sense is not dead; it has been shut inside the law, and that is where the two meet again. « Without prejudice » at the head of a letter is what sem prejuízo de says in Portuguese — except that there the phrase is ordinary office language and needs no solicitor to read it.