Cooking and preparing

The twenty-fourth entry is a colher de pau, and the two languages reach the same object from opposite materials. Portuguese inherited a colher from Latin cochlear, which was built on cochlea, a snail: the Roman implement had a small bowl at one end and a point at the other, and the point was there to winkle a snail out of its shell. The name recorded what the tool was for, and every spoon since, wooden or silver, is still called after that shell. English took the other road. « Spoon » comes from an Old English word spōn meaning a chip or a shaving of wood — the same word that survives in German Span — and it settled on the eating implement only afterwards, because the cheapest one anybody owned was a splinter with a hollow scooped into it. So « a wooden spoon » says the material twice, once in the adjective and once inside the noun that has forgotten it, while a colher de pau quietly adds wood to a shell. Two kitchens, two first objects, one shape that outlived them both.