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Espeland Posted 18 years ago
Vocabulary

salao

Hello everybody !

I wonder where the word "salao" comes from. It seems to mean "very unlucky" and appears right at the beginning of Ernest Hemingway's "The old man and the sea" :

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy's parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, [...]

In Portugese "salão" means "saloon" but that can't be the origine, can it ?
  
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