Farm machinery

The twenty-sixth entry is o silo de trincheira, and the word a British farmer uses for it is one this reader already owns for something else. In English a « clamp » is a thing that grips: the G-clamp on a bench, the wheel clamp on a badly parked car, the clamp a surgeon closes on a vessel. None of that is what sits at the end of a farmyard. There a « clamp » is a long covered heap of something being kept — the potato clamp was a ridge of roots under straw and earth — and the walled pit of grass, sheeted and weighted down, is « the silage clamp ». So one language names the thing after the trench that holds it and the other after the heap inside it, and the word for that heap is also the word for the tool. Two notes for writing it. The verb followed the noun into the yard, so « to clamp silage » is to pack it and seal it. And « silo » in British farming is normally the tall tower, which makes silo the one word here that does not carry across.