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To clarify, it's usually made of plastic and used in watering plants.
(As for the roundabout wording - I'm trying to find out whether there is a standard word for it in English or if there's a variety of words one can use. The usual dictionaries/Google/Wikipedia crawl hasn't produced anything conclusive.)
I call it a spray bottle.
I have one for the cat (as in, spray the cat, she's trying to climb the drapes again.), and I use one to keep my paints moist when I'm getting down with my artsy self.
Alright, thanks guys. This one is sort of typical for the sort of word I tend not to know. Usually I can figure it out in a snap using the usual Wikipedia/Google route, but I was surprised to see that this time that didn't produce a single convincing answer.
I guess this confirms my suspicion that people use different words for it. Thanks for your input!
I'd reckon it was, dano - but my conclusion based on this thread would be that in English one would use "spray bottle" to mean the object proper, and perhaps "(plant) mister" to stress its use as a gardening tool, depending on context, dialect and/or idiolect. Does this make sense? The distinction is important to me, as in Dutch "plantenspuit" == "plantenspuit", for ever and always.
Compare the scene in Planet of the Apes where one of the apes is insulted because someone called him a "monkey" instead of "ape" - this joke wouldn't work in Dutch because both classes are referred to as "aap".
For an extreme example, compare "set", possibly the most semantically saturated word in the English language. Scroll down to the list of other-language equivalents near the bottom, and it will become apparent that those "what's the right word" things that a native speaker might not even be aware of can be real conundrums for a non-native speaker or translator.
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