Glassmaking

The eighth entry is a cana de sopro, and the first noun is the one to watch, because English owns the same word and has given it to a different object. A cana and « cane » both descend from canna, the reed, and outside the workshop they answer each other well enough: the walking stick, the sugar plant, the fishing rod. Inside a glasshouse they part company altogether. The tool this entry names — the hollow iron tube that picks up the molten glass and is blown down — is in English « the blowing iron », or simply « the blowpipe ». « Cane » is already taken, and by something the glassmaker handles every day: a solid rod of coloured glass, drawn out long and thin, cut into short lengths and laid up side by side to build a pattern. Anybody handed « a bundle of cane » expects decoration, not a pipe. The trap deserves stating in full precisely because the cognate feels so safe: rendering a cana de sopro as « the blowing cane » gives a phrase that sounds like English and names nothing in the trade.