Well, it’s always amazing to me how much I learn when I’m writing a novel. In this case, it’s a term defined and how it applies to my story.

I always thought port de bra was a specific arm position, so when I got to a specific place in my story, where the main character, our severely hurt ballerina, is in the hospital, someone noticed that she slept in the port de bra position.

Being the conscientious writer that I try to be, I decided it would be good to do a search online to see exactly what the port de bra arm position looked like, so that I would be expressing myself correctly in this section of my current novel endeavor.

Amazed as I am, this is what I found:

PORT DE BRA: noun. 1. the technique of moving the arms properly. 2. the exercises for developing this technique.

Huh! Double Huh!

Ok. So I guess what I really wanted to express to the reader is that our ballerina, while in the hospital, slept mainly with her arms in the fourth port de bra position.

Well, live and learn!