Last week I had the pleasure and privilege to be part of a Decelerator Lab on Bute.
One of our Cohort was Luiza Yang from Brazil. Apart from finding hidden talents in Ceilidh dancing and improv (!), she is also wonderful at expressing herself in English.
One thing she and I talked about was the meaning of words in different languages, such as the Portuguese word Saudade. My earlier thoughts on that word are here, and although as an English speaker, I cannot possibly fully grasp the feeling of Saudade, when I took the microphone one night in Bute and sang Caledonia, I could feel, as all Scots living outside Scotland likely can, a similar feeling of missing Scotland.
Anyway, Luiza this week wrote a LI post capturing some thoughts from the week on Bute. This paragraph jumped out at me:
..what really moved me the most was to get know so many people behind their fancy working titles. We were encouraged not to talk about this, which can be a challenge for some: the WHO we are can be really intertwined with WHAT we do. In Portuguese we have two different verbs to represent this. In English the verb “to be” summarizes it all. In Brazil I always presented myself: eu ESTOU (as something transitional in this particular stage of my life) manager of xyz, not eu SOU (who I actually am) manager of xyz. I lost that in English, but the feeling remains.
I love this distinction. An attempt at putting this into English might be to say “I am currently”, or “right now I am” {manager at XYZ co}, but it feels to me that this infers that you are focussed on no longer being in that role, whereas I have the sense that “eu estou” is more subtle than that.
I’ll share this post with Luiza and ask for her thoughts on the difference in meaning between Portuguese and English.
Meanwhile, who are you right now?