IKEA cuts ribbon on 'I've Got A Screw Loose Street' Flatpack monolith IKEA has announced that its new tentacle in Valladolid, Spain, will sit on "I've Got A Screw Loose Street". According to Spanish national ABC, Facebook fans of the Scandie particle board botherer selected "Calle me falta un tornillo" as option A for the new thoroughfare on the site at Arroyo de la Encomienda …
Does the Spanish word "tornillo" meaning "screw" carry the same idiomatic sexual double-entendre that it does in English? As in "to screw" meaning to have sex with, or does "tornillo" merely refer to a spirally-threaded fastening device in Spanish idiom?
Automatic translation of languages often fails because of this effect of cultural idioms and double-entendres that may exist in one language but not another.
I took "me falta un tornillo" to be a reference to the common belief that there is always a screw missing from the packages of Ikea but a quick poll of the office confirms that it also has the same "screw loose" meaning as in English.
Academic reference: Harrap's Spanish Idioms 1991: Faltarle a uno un tornillo (col): have a screw loose
My translation from the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española:
tornillo. Masculine noun. 1. Cylindrical or conical item, generally of metal, with a helical extrusion and a head suitable for screwing it in*. || 2. (Central America) A bush of the Sterculia family, which has red flowers and a capsule fruit which is twisted in the form of a helix, and is used in medicine.
Then follow a few compound phrases, none of which are sexual.
* This isn't circular, because the verb is enroscar, which certainly doesn't seem to be a cognate.
...or, in the case of IKEA, it's "I look great for a while but then I get a screw loose and kind of tilt to one side and then a shelf falls off those little brass things and it takes a chunk out of the MDF so it doesn't sit right and then I fall over this one time and afterword start kind of leaning forward so you can only put books in sideways up against my back and then you say fuck it and shove me over flat and throw me out on the curb with a copy of 'Anna Karenina' from high school still inside" street.
I guess they don't have space on the signs.
That's just stupid. Several-sandwiches-short-of-a-picknick and several-beers-short-of-a-six-pack type stupid.
So all the dictionary-waving pedants, if you don't understand the language, keep your opinions and book translations. When's the last time a dictionary-based translation ended happily? The ubiquity of Chinglish points to "never".
"Missing a screw" is a standard expression for mental deficiency in Spanish, French and (southern) Dutch at least, and you can escalate it to "several screws" for class-A Nimrod level stupidity.
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