When we pick up and order the room in the purest Marie Kondo style. When someone abandons their clothes to walk around the house to doll up in their best clothes. Or when we carefully wash the car, leaving it as if it had just left the dealership. Spanish has an expression to describe all these situations: “like the jets of gold.”
We are faced with a full-fledged idiom, that is, before an expression well fixed in the collective imagination of the speakers, whose meaning cannot be deduced from the words that form it. Virtually everyone uses the phrase “like jets of gold” in its proper context, and yet no one often gives any thought to the words in it. Streams of gold? What the heck do you mean?
The dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) defines this adjective phrase (also used as an adverbial) with a concise and effective “very clean”. There is no surprise, “like the jets of gold” is used to say that something or someone is immaculate, neat, well washed… Clean as a whistle (by the way, the whistle is the tray, usually golden, where the host during mass).
It is more complicated to find the origin of the expression, since different theories circulate that try to explain where it comes from.
There are those who maintain that the expression “like the jets of gold” comes from the waters of the rivers where the gold nuggets are found, small smooth eroded pieces. Curling the loop, it could refer to the extraction process with a pan and sieve, since it is possible to filter out impurities such as gravel, roots and other stones.
Gold can be found embedded in some rocks or minerals such as quartz. Specifically, it is in the quartz veins where this precious -and precious- metal can be found (along with other yellow minerals such as pyrite), forming a kind of jet on the stone.
The most widespread theory about the origin of the expression is in the treatment of gold, specifically in the purification phase in which the metal is melted in the crucible. As explained by CIODE, a company specialized in precious metals, once the purification is finished, the liquid gold is passed to an ingot mold before it cools; This transfer of liquid gold transmits a lot of cleanliness and shine, according to experts, to the point of giving rise to the locution “like the jets of gold”.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
