Shackled in Spanish - For Better or Worse

Much to my regret, a polyglot I'm not.  Schoolgirl French confused the hell out of me - how could common everyday objects have a gender?  Trying to pick up Portuguese to aid communication in Mozambique brought the same problem - the gender of an object changed EVERYTHING in the sentence and flummoxed my uniglot brain.

Fortunately, No 2 Son, who consistently walked the failure line with Afrikaans at school, appears to have a natural linguistic ear and tongue for indigenous African languages and has taught himself some basic isiZulu, SiSwati and isiXhosa.  He happily chats away to appreciative locals in their own tongue and I'm both proud of and envy him for this skill.

Not, it must be said, that English is easy for people to learn.  Which is totally amazing to a native English speaker, absolutely oblivious to the wily traps of our language.  We don't give a thought to the trickeries of homonyms, for instance. 

Huh?  

Yup, those tricky words both spelt and pronounced the same, with completely different meanings.  A selection: 
Address   Back   Bank   Board   Cast   Check   Duck  Exact   Fair   Fine   Fly
Grave   Groom   Hood   Iron    Jam    Line    Plane    Skirt   Wave   Yard 

Getting the picture?  And that's before we tackle Eight and Ate, Nay and Neigh, Fare and Fair, Knife, Five and Fifth...

Spanish, I think, takes the cake for having a homonym which has a rather startling juxtaposition of meanings.

Esposas. Wife.  And Handcuffs.  Female readers keep breathing.  Male - pick yourselves off the floor and stop laughing.  This can be unpacked in a less than flattering view of the husband, as well.

Picture the scene back in Spanish Stone Age.  Reluctant bride dragged by the hair to the altar. (I always think of an altar as a slab upon which sacrifices are made.  It's an interesting choice of name for the spot on which couples are forever bound, swearing to forsake all others, care, obey (?!) and so on).

Once delivered to the altar, poor Cavewoman is handcuffed / bound to the excited groom.  Maybe they had to tie them together before she legged it back to her peaceful berry-gathering.  Smart woman knew what awaited - skinning and cooking the woolly mammoth he brought home, washing his bearskin skivvies...

However it happened, Spanish speakers are stuck with a word whose double meaning is quite derogatory.  Although, get a group of English speaking husbands together and in no time at all they are speaking about their 'ball and chain', 'trouble and strife' and 'handbrake'. Notice how they are awfully brave in a group and out of earshot...

Misogyny has no language barrier, it seems.