Moving house and furniture

The eighteenth entry is a cómoda, the chest of drawers, and it is the one word on this page an English reader will recognise and put in the wrong room. We own it: « commode » reached us from French in the eighteenth century carrying exactly the sense Portuguese still has, a low chest of drawers standing against a wall. Then our language did something to it. Because such a chest could be built to hide a chamber pot, the name slid towards the hiding place and away from the furniture, until in ordinary use in Britain it now means one thing: the chair or small cabinet at a bedside that holds a pot, ordered from a chemist for somebody who cannot reach a bathroom. The old meaning survives, but only in the antiques trade and the saleroom catalogue. So À cómoda falta um pé reports a missing foot on a bedroom chest, and reaching for our inherited word would move the sentence to a hospital ward. A cómoda is « a chest of drawers », and the family likeness is a trap rather than a help.