Brazilians invented a word for getting things done when the system was never designed to help you.
Jeitinho is the diminutive of jeito, meaning way, which descends from the Latin jactum, a throw or cast.1 In Brazilian Portuguese, dar um jeitinho means to find a way, to improvise a solution when the official path is blocked, broken, or nonexistent. It describes creativity under constraint, the art of navigating a system that was not designed with your interests in mind.
Sociologist Roberto DaMatta described jeitinho as a Brazilian style of social navigation, a way of personalizing impersonal bureaucratic encounters.2 The historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda connected it to the figure of the "cordial man" in his 1936 book Raízes do Brasil, arguing that Brazilians tend to make all relationships personal, dissolving the boundary between public rules and private bonds.3
The practice spans a spectrum. At one end, jeitinho is harmless improvisation: convincing a bureaucrat to accept a document one day early. At the other end, it shades into corruption, the use of personal connections to bypass rules that exist for good reason. Anthropologist Lívia Barbosa studied this duality in her 1992 book O Jeitinho Brasileiro, subtitled "The Art of Being More Equal than Others."4
Cross-cultural researchers have compared jeitinho to guanxi in China, wasta in the Arab world, and "pulling strings" in Britain.5 The common thread is that wherever formal systems fail to serve the people living under them, informal systems emerge to fill the gap. Brazil gave that gap a name, a grammar, and a diminutive suffix that makes it sound almost affectionate.