Technology and data

El cortafuegos is built the way Spanish likes to build things: a verb and its object welded together. Corta plus fuegos — it cuts fires. Once the pattern is visible it turns up everywhere: el salvapantallas saves screens, el lavavajillas washes dishes, el sacacorchos pulls corks, el rascacielos scrapes skies, el paraguas stops water. They are all masculine, they all end in <b>-s</b> in the singular as well as the plural, and each can be read as a small sentence. English puts two nouns together instead — « firewall », « screensaver » — which says what the thing sits next to rather than what it does.