The right tools for the job!

Finding that a drawer under the bed, in which I keep odds and ends of paperwork as we have no actual desk here, had effectively fallen apart, I went and bought wood glue. The instructions came in a variety of languages. The English told us to stick the relevant bits together and them leave them with a weight on top for at least 30 minutes. Actually it said a weight or a jack. Now, I may not be a mechanic but I am pretty sure a jack is not the tool required in such a situation. Surely a brace or a vice of some kind. 

The Spanish require the application of "un peso", a weight, or "un gato". Anyone who ever saw the magician Paul Daniels talking about his system for foreign language learning back in the 1990s will be familiar his idea for memorising words: attach a visual image. "Gato" is the Spanish for cat, so think of a cat eating a large slice of gateau. (Not the image I would have chosen but it worked for some of my students at the time.) 

Well, if you look up "gato" in the dictionary you will find that it also means a jack. But I was already visualising persuading a cat to sit on top of my glued drawer and wondering where I might find such a biddable cat. Our son's cat is prone to sit in one place for quite long periods of time but she tends to choose the location herself. 

As a good linguist should, I cross-checked the word in the English-Spanish end of the dictionary. A jack - un gato. To jack up (e.g. car) - levantar con gato - or possibly to lift up with a cat. So now I was busy imagining a situation where I might have a puncture and need to jack up the car, busily hunting for a big, strong cat who would lift the vehicle and hold it while we changed the tyre! 

Words are quite fascinating. I am pretty sure there are some Spaniards who might not be aware of the technological uses of their domestic cat! And then there is the humble spanner: in Spanish "una llave inglesa", which also means an English key. Why should it be English, I ask myself. Did an Englishman invent it? 

When my father was learning Spanish, determined to be able to communicate at least at a basic level with my younger sister's Spanish husband, we bought him a children's book called "My 100 First Words in Spanish". Each page had topic based picture of objects, conveniently labelled. There was also a duck hidden on the page somewhere, predating the much more complicated "Where's Wally." books. 

I seem to remember it had pages of kitchen equipment and farm animals, hospital stuff and gardening paraphernalia but if there was a page of useful tools to have around the home, such as a "cat" to put on your newly glued drawer, it completely passed me by! 

We were unable to find a willing cat and so we upended a coffee table to serve as a weight to help our glue to set.