Umbrellas

:  The canvas-laden, spring-loaded stick with wires is good, primarily, for one thing; that is, to locally repel the rain, and by “locally” I mean over one’s head.  They are not necessarily meant to make a fashion statement, although I suppose if you are the Queen of England or a Parisian model you may view their functionality with disdain and be more focused on the chromatic complement of the device.  Umbrellas are not a good double for a putter in golf, although I suppose you could use one to club someone over the head if alternative self-defense weaponry were not immediately available – after all, this how the majority of martial arts weapons came about, that is, by using everyday objects and tools to a different purpose…scythes for Bo staffs, ox goads for psais (think of the trident used by Raphael, the red Ninja Turtle).  Umbrellas are quite useless as a shield, unless the bullets you wish to deflect are the zillions of liquid ones that fall from the heavens, in which case you would have selected just the right shield, indeed.  Umbrellas are not good for breaking a skydiver’s fall, unless they are the excessively big, semi-lunar shaped ones that deploy from a backpack.  Umbrellas are not good for shielding one form cosmic radiation, either, but a concrete umbrella would do just fine, although I’m afraid the weight of it would be far too impractical for most and the risk-benefit analysis would tend towards the ‘risk’ end of things more often than not in this case.  Umbrellas are not good for putting out fires, although they may be incidentally good for putting out eyes if used without discretion.  Umbrella in Spanish is “paraguas”, which directly translates to “for the waters”, and I think this describes its purpose quite well and straightforwardly, in fact, as most Latin derivative words do.  Sometimes, examining words in other languages and their etymology will tell us a lot more about the word than Webster’s plain definition can.  For example, ancient Chinese character for “righteousness” is the compound of two characters:  the character for “myself” written under the character for “sheep”, or another way of putting it, “righteousness” is “me under the lamb”.