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enthusiast
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I have no idea if this is the root, but I have to say that in Italian there is the verbe mancare , related to the meaning of to miss, but in the reverse order, I mean that mancare should be "to be missed" ( does it exists?)
Anyway, mancometro sounds to me as a measure of something missing.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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"manque. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English ...
... from Old Italian mancare, from manco, lacking, from Latin mancus, maimed, infirm."
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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caradea asks, but what does "manco" [in portuguese] mean?According to http://google.com/language_tools?hl=en, it means "lame". (That site gives no translation for "mancó" with the accent.)
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Carpal Tunnel
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manqué \ma{n}-kay\ [F] - short of or frustrated in the fulfillment of one's aspirations or talents (a poet manqué) http://home.mn.rr.com/wwftd/
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Carpal Tunnel
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"manquer" in French means to miss. I don't know what metro means in Portugese but Cap is correct for here - metro is an underground train. If I had to translate based on similar words, I'd say mancometro meant the person missed the train.
How do you pronounce the o with the accent aigue. (I can't find it on my keyboard). Can you give me a similar sound in English ASp?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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There is a country saying that someone was behind the door when the brains were passed out. Explication by PM if needed.
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Carpal Tunnel
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How do you pronounce the o with the accent aigue
If it's anything like Spanish it just means that's where the accent goes despite rules to the contrary. No other pronunciation change. In Spanish the vowels are all pretty much pronounced the same accented or unaccented; I know Portuguese does some funny things, though.
I don't think there's any connection with subways; metro is usually an abbreviation for metropolitan [rail system] or something like that. I suspect it means measure here. Might be the whole thang is the measure of how much somebody misses the point.
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Carpal Tunnel
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misses the point.
Of course, unless "mancómetro" is actually a word, a discussion of its supposed meaning is pointless and "manco" [lame].
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Carpal Tunnel
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I'm prepared to believe that there is such a word, that just hasn't gotten into the dictionaries available to us. Just as I had to really hunt to find "l'ésprit de l'escalier", and "treppenwitz". I think it is clever enough to warrant its adoption. It could really be fun to ask somebody with room temp IQ "What's your mancómetro?"
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Okay, this isn't responsive to your query, ASp, but i thought i'd share: i spoke to a friend of mine who was born and raised in Rio, and she didn't recognize the expression at all, but a couple of hours later she called back, saying the curiousity had gotten the better of her so she'd called her sister (who evidently still lives there). anyhow, her sister recognized it immediately, and said it's a "colloquial" term (wow, your portuguese must be *awesome, Anna!), and she added this bit of info: "manca" means (as she put it) "people who don't have a clue". the example she used was a person who arrives uninvited during the dinner hour and has absolutely no idea that their presence is intrusive. i asked for a usage example and she offered this: " Ele neo se manca", which supposedly means "he's a clueless git". (or am *i the clueless git, and she's tricked me into writing "i'm a clueless git" in portuguese, since she knows i don't speak a word of it?  )
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