Colloquial Expressions
"Conto" was the unofficial multiple of the escudo: 1 conto meant 1000$00, 2 contos meant 2000$00 and so on. The original expression was "conto de réis", which meant "one million réis". Since the escudo was worth 1000 réis (the older currency), therefore one "conto" was the same as a thousand escudos. The expression remained in usage after the advent of th euro, albeit less often, meaning €5, roughly worth 1000 escudos.
Read more about this topic: Portuguese Escudo
Famous quotes containing the words colloquial and/or expressions:
“Many great writers have been extraordinarily awkward in daily exchange, but the greatest give the impression that their style was nursed by the closest attention to colloquial speech.”
—Thornton Wilder (1897–1975)
“Our books are false by being fragmentary: their sentences are bon mots, and not parts of natural discourse; childish expressions of surprise or pleasure in nature; or, worse, owing a brief notoriety to their petulance, or aversion from the order of nature,—being some curiosity or oddity, designedly not in harmony with nature, and purposely framed to excite surprise, as jugglers do by concealing their means.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)