False Friends

For those of you who have never learned a foreign language, false friends are those words that two languages have in common, but do not have the same meaning in each language. There are many of these, leading to confusion and embarrassment. For English/Portuguese there is a big list of them here.

After 17 years I Portugal, I was caught out by one this week: Commitment is simultaneously empenho (adjective) and compromisso (noun). I referred to my young, ambitious colleagues as comprometidos. Oops. Everybody understood that I meant committed, but it came out as compromised! Actually, I have got compromised colleagues, but they are not the ones I was referring to...

Back to school I guess.