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Edit EntryA Cobra vai Fumar
A Cobra vai Fumar
1944. Depois de cinco anos de Segunda Guerra Mundial, o Brasil envia tropas à Itália. Dizia-se: mais fácil a cobra fumar que o Brasil entrar na guerra. A Força Expedicionária adotou então a cobra fumante como símbolo. A cobra vai fumar: a situação vai piorar, vai aguçar-se. Ou, atualmente, “o bicho vai pegar”.
Edit EntryVá plantar batatas!
Vá plantar batatas!
Vem de Portugal, de uma época em que a agricultura era vista com certo desdém, já que o país estava voltado para a pesca e navegações. A batata, tão básica, não era considerada alimento nobre, e demorou a ser adotada na culinária. Plantar batatas, portanto, não era das atividades mais benquistas.
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History of the Brazil-U.S. Relationship
from http://www.brasilemb.org/profile_brazil/brazil_usa_war.shtml
The United States entered the 19th century as an independent nation, while Brazil, still a colony, was on its way to gaining independence. In 1808, as Napoleon’s armies began the invasion of Portugal, the King transferred his court to Rio de Janeiro thus transforming the city into the capital of a European empire. In 1815 the status of Brazil was elevated from colony to United Kingdom with Portugal. King João VI returned to Portugal six years later, leaving his son behind as Regent.
In 1822, a year after the King’s return, the Crown Prince proclaimed Brazil an independent constitutional monarchy and had himself crowned Emperor Pedro I. The United States was the first country to recognize Brazil’s independence and Washington received its first Brazilian envoy, José Silvestre Rabello, in 1824. In 1831 Pedro I abdicated the throne of Brazil in favor of his son, Pedro II, who ruled for fifty-eight years.
In the mid 19th century Brazil and the U.S. each fought a war with a former colony of Spain. Texas had been an independent republic for almost ten years when it was finally admitted as a state to the United States. Close on the heels of Texas’ annexation came the Mexican War (1846-48) between the U.S. and Mexico. Texas claimed the Rio Grande as its southwestern boundary; Mexico claimed the region as far north and east as the Nueces River. The war was settled by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Mexico conceded the border question: the Rio Grande would be Texas’ southwestern border. Mexico also ceded to the U.S., for $15 million, land now occupied by the states of California, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico.
Brazil, allied with Argentina and Uruguay, fought the War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay from 1865 to 1870. Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano López took advantage of civil war in Uruguay to further his ambition of dominating the entire River Plate region. When he invaded Brazil in December 1864, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil signed the Triple Alliance treaty in Buenos Aires to defend themselves against López’ aggression. Although the Allies won the war, the high casualties and the long duration weakened the Brazilian monarchy. This was the last war Brazil had with any of its neighbors. More than a century later, in 1991, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay formed the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUL), the most important trade organization on the Southern continent.
By 1830, of the total number of individuals of African descent living in the Western Hemisphere, 25 percent lived in Brazil and 25 percent lived in the United States.
The remaining 50 percent were scattered throughout the Caribbean and in other South American countries. Both countries experienced profound upheaval to bring about the end of slavery. The United States fought a civil war; Brazil changed its form of government. On January 1, 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves in the Confederate States of America. However, it wasn’t until the North was victorious and the thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was passed in 1865 that slavery ended in the United States.
Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil had a lively appreciation for the contributions that science and technology could make to society. He was interested in expanding his country’s primary commodities, including making Brazil a major cotton producer. After the defeat of the South in the U.S. Civil War, he invited diehard confederates who had been successful in cultivating the South’s cotton to come to Brazil. Between 1867 and 1871, a time when slavery was still legal in Brazil, at least 3,000 Southern confederate families passed through the port of Rio de Janeiro. About 80 percent of the confederates returned to the United States, but one successful settlement - Americana - founded by Colonel William Hutchinson Norris of Mobile, Alabama, remains to this day.
Located 75 miles from the city of São Paulo, Americana today has a population of 250,000. Among the descendants of the confederados (about 10 percent of the population), conversations are often in Southern-accented English. Families, some named Jones, MacKnight and Whitaker, come together for the Fourth of July and other holidays and have a Southern-style barbecue. Rosalyn Carter, wife of former President Jimmy Carter, has relatives buried in the confederate cemetery in Americana. In 1992, President-elect Bill Clinton wrote a letter to the confederados of Americana before he took office in which he recalled that Arkansas was one of the thirteen states that had settlers in Brazil.
In Brazil slavery was abolished gradually. In 1871, six years after U.S. emancipation, children born to Brazilian slaves were no longer considered slaves. In 1888, with Emperor Dom Pedro II away in Europe, his daughter, Princess Isabel, acting as Regent, signed the Golden Law (Lei Áurea) which finally abolished slavery in Brazil. The Golden Law set off a reaction among Brazilian slave owners which rapidly eroded the political foundations of the monarchy. After a few months of parliamentary crisis, the Emperor was asked to leave the country and a Republic was established. The victory of the North in the Civil War set the United States on an industrialized course whereas Brazil remained mostly agrarian until the 1930s.
Emperor Dom Pedro II, an admirer of Abraham Lincoln, visited the United States during the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. While at the Exposition, The Emperor met Alexander Graham Bell who was demonstrating his new invention - the telephone. The Emperor was the first person to buy stock in Bell’s company, the Bell Telephone Company. One of the first telephones in the world in a private residence was installed in the Emperor’s Palace in Petrópolis, his summer retreat forty miles from Rio de Janeiro.
In the later part of the 19th century music started to become a link between the two countries. American pianist and composer Louis Gottschalk was invited by Emperor Dom Pedro II to Brazil in 1869 to give a series of concerts. Gottschalk wrote a set of variations entitled Triumphant Fantasy on the Brazilian National Anthem which he dedicated to the eldest daughter of the Emperor, Princess Isabel. Music historians consider that Gottschalk’s rhythms influenced the beginnings of jazz.
On the occasion of the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, Brazilian opera composer Carlos Gomes performed his work for the American audiences and again at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. His music recently re-emerged with the 1996 Kennedy Center presentation of his opera, Il Guarany, by the Washington Opera, with Plácido Domingo in the leading tenor role.
When the Brazilian Republic was declared in 1889 it was called the United States of Brazil and the new government structure was based on the U.S. structure: a President and Vice President, a bicameral Congress, and an independent judiciary. (In the 1970’s Brazil changed its name to the Federative Republic of Brazil.) Brazil has 26 states and a federal district; the U.S. has 50 states and a federal district. State governments in both countries mirror the federal structure. Federal revenue sharing, a subject of much debate in the U.S. Congress, was incorporated into the 1988 Brazilian Constitution. Thus a federal revenue sharing system provides the Brazilian states, just as it does the American states, considerable resources.
As the 19th century ended, the history of aviation was beginning, a story in which Brazilians and Americans each claim the leading role. While in the U.S. the Wright brothers are the undisputed pioneers of aviation, in Brazil, Alberto Santos Dumont is considered the Father of Aviation. In 1898 Dumont was the first to construct and fly a gasoline-powered, lighter-than-air craft. In 1906 in Paris, France, he succeeded in making the world’s first, officially-observed, powered flight of a heavier-than-air machine. Orville and Wilbur Wright made several controlled, sustained flights in a power-driven, heavier-than-air craft near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903, but it wasn’t until 1908 that their achievement was recognized in the United States.
In 1889 American poet Walt Whitman wrote a poem welcoming the birth of the Brazilian Republic
Welcome, Brazilian Brother - thy ample place is ready;
A Loving Hand - a Smile from the North -
A Sunny Instant Hail!
(Let the Future Care for itself, where it reveals
its Troubles, Impediments,
Ours, Ours, the Present Throe, the Democratic Aim,
the Acceptance and Faith);
To Thee To-day our Reaching Arm, our Turning Neck -
To thee from Us the Expectant Eye,
Thou Cluster Free! Thou Brilliant Lustous One!
Thou, Learning Well,
The True Lesson of a Nation’s Light in the Sky,
(More Shining than the Cross, more than the Crown),
The Height to Be Superb Humanity.
Pôr a mão no fogo
Pôr a mão no fogo
Em julgamentos na Idade Média, o acusado deveria caminhar alguns metros segurando uma barra de ferro em brasa. Se as mãos, protegidas apenas por uma estopa, ficassem intatas, o réu era considerado inocente. Senão, era enforcado. Ficou a expressão “pôr a mão no fogo” (por uma pessoa): confiar nela plenamente.
Edit EntryA pressa é inimiga da perfeição
A pressa é inimiga da perfeição.
Em 1899, Clóvis Bevilacqua foi convidado para redigir nosso primeiro Código Civil. Concluiu a tarefa em seis meses. Ruy Barbosa, que viu erros na obra, discordou da rapidez com que o governo queria aprová-la e cravou: “A pressa é inimiga da perfeição.” O novo Código só foi aprovado em 1916, com 1.027 emendas. A expressão pegou imediatamente.
Para inglês ver
ORIGEM DA EXPRESSÃO: Para inglês ver
Em 1831, o ministro Diogo Antônio Feijó promulgou lei que proibiu tráfico de escravos, sob pressão britânica. O crime continuou por anos. Navios negreiros, abordados pelos ingleses, jogavam os africanos ao mar e estavam dentro da lei: “para inglês ver”. Virou sinônimo de falsas aparências.
Edit EntryTrombada
Trombada
Na cidade de São Paulo em 1929, o bonde Vila Maria passava pela Rua Catumbi quando o elefante Eli, fugido do circo, o encarou. Apesar da estridente campainha do bonde, Eli não se intimidou e jogou-se contra o Vila Maria, protegido pela tromba: deu-lhe uma “trombada”. Danificou o bonde e caiu desacordado. Trombada: colisão, choque, batida.
Edit EntryDeu Zebra
ORIGEM DA EXPRESSÃO: Deu Zebra
Campeonato carioca de 1964. A Portuguesa do Rio pega o Vasco, favorito. Gentil Cardoso, técnico da Lusa, prevê resultado tão impossível como o sorteio da zebra no jogo do bicho – o animal não figura no rol. “Hoje vai dar zebra”, diz Gentil. A Portuguesa ganha e a expressão pega na hora. Deu zebra: aconteceu o inesperado.