Organ building

The forty-third entry is o soprador, the electric fan that keeps the bellows full, and English names that machine from the same idea and in the same shape: « the blower », the thing that blows. A reader who stops there will still be caught out, because in Britain « the blower » is heard far more often for something with no air in it at all. « Get on the blower » means telephone somebody, and « he has been on the blower all morning » says he has spent it on the phone. The sense came from the speaking tubes once fitted in ships and offices, where air was blown down the pipe to whistle at the far end, and the name outlived the apparatus by a century. None of that reached Portuguese. O soprador stays with the organ and the forge, and the telephone is o telefone and nothing else. So the words to watch are the bare ones: « the blower is being serviced » beside an organ is the fan, the same four words in an office are almost certainly the telephone, and only the room decides which.