31. AO PÉ DA LETRA

Here we go, dear foreign, the last expression of this part of our project, and I just wanna say how much I had fun in this journey. I loved every second of it, and I hope you have enjoyed it as much as I did.

I created this blog for me, to give wings to my imagination, but also for you, to share with you a piece of my world, the Brazilian universe that makes so little and so much sense at the same time. I hope you got to laugh as much as I did, and who knows, maybe you will use one of these expressions one day, and if you do, you’ll remember me, and that’s all I could ask for.

Now, enough with the mushiness, let’s go to our expression: “ao pé da letra”.

I couldn’t have chosen a better one for today. The literal translation? “To the foot of the letter”. The actual meaning? Literally! The literal translation or interpretation of something.

Now tell me if it isn’t the greatest of the ironies that the expression used to say “literally” is a figurative expression and doesn’t follow its literal sense?

It could also mean “rigorously”, “strictly”, like when you have to follow that recipe “ao pé da letra”, otherwise that cake will go wrong.

So, every time I brought you the actual meaning of an expression in the past 30 days, I also brought the literal translation that made no sense, the translation “to the foot of the letter” (the alphabet one, not the mail).

And since this is a Brazilian saying, the to the foot of the letter meaning of “to the foot of the letter” expression doesn’t make much sense and it isn’t its actual meaning.

Now, since letters have no foot, apparently the original expression is the French expression “au pied de la lettre”, and no one really knows why or how the foot came into the story. And although we, Brazilian speakers of the Portuguese language use the version with the foot, the Portuguese speakers use it without the foot, “à letra”, which means “by the letter”. In that

case it would make a bit more sense (but what’s the fun in that?!).

There’s also a Latin expression that could have originated “ao pé da letra”, “Ipsis litteris”, and it means “by the same letters”. And yet no foot.

One theory about the presence of the foot in a letter would be that it happens by the same process that gave legs to tables and arms to chairs.

This expression sounded very meta at the end, and I like it even more now than I did before.

Well, this is goodbye for now. But not forever.

Someday I might wake up with the will to save dear foreigners from the foot of the letter translations of Brazilian expressions again, who knows?!

Till then,

expressionada.