Common household items which name I never managed to learn until now: clothespin and strainer

[André Vasconcelos]

Hello,

I don't know whether anybody shares this difficulty, but I've always struggled to remember the name of these two items, and usually I have to resort to the name in another language (Klammer, Sieb) or just waving in the general direction of these objects and asking for "the thing to hang the clothes" or "the thing to filter the water".

I've tested this theory on my office-mates and none of them could produce the words for these objects, so I think that I am onto something. 

Clothespin

Strainer

[Riccardo Di Corato]

these are words they don't teach you in school (they'd rather teach you some impossible animals you'll never see), you don't learn them during your Erasmus (who cares about these things!) but now that you're a grown up man with family they finally get the recognition they deserve

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[Dan Lakey]

Ah, now, that second thing is a sieve. 

A strainer is a different thing altogether, and is, of course, never to be confused with a colander.

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Rocket Scientist and International Adventurer

On 15 August 2017 at 11:51, Riccardo Di Corato <riccardo...@gmail.com> wrote:

these are words they don't teach you in school (they'd rather teach you some impossible animals you'll never see), you don't learn them during your Erasmus (who cares about these things!) but now that you're a grown up man with family they finally get the recognition they deserve

On 15 August 2017 at 10:29, André Vasconcelos <andre.o.v...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello,

I don't know whether anybody shares this difficulty, but I've always struggled to remember the name of these two items, and usually I have to resort to the name in another language (Klammer, Sieb) or just waving in the general direction of these objects and asking for "the thing to hang the clothes" or "the thing to filter the water".

I've tested this theory on my office-mates and none of them could produce the words for these objects, so I think that I am onto something. 

Clothespin

Strainer

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[André Vasconcelos]

The plot thickens! 

In my defence, I used the first google image result for "strainer", which of course does not mean anything in itself.

According to Wikipedia (see below), a strainer is a particular form of a sieve. Do you agree with this?

A sieve, or sifter, is a device for separating wanted elements from unwanted material or for characterizing the particle size distribution of a sample, typically using a woven screen such as a mesh or net or metal.^[1] The word "sift" derives from "sieve". In cooking, a sifter is used to separate and break up clumps in dry ingredients such as flour, as well as to aerate and combine them. A strainer is a form of sieve used to separate solids from liquid.

[Katharina Neises]

I've only ever heard "peg" and "sieve" for those two items when I was living in England! :-)

Clothespin might be Am Eng? http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/peg