Sweet biscuits are usually soaked in an infusion to soften them by absorbing the liquid.
The Latin word imbibĕre came to Spanish as embeber . The Royal Spanish Academy ( RAE ), in its dictionary, recognizes more than a dozen meanings of the term.
Absorb or soak
The first meaning refers to what a solid object does when it absorbs a liquid . Soaking also consists of soaking a permeable or porous element with a liquid , a common action in the field of gastronomy .
For example: “To prepare the cake, you must first soak the cookies in milk” , “By soaking the cake in coffee, it becomes much softer” , “If you want to disinfect the screen, you can soak a cotton ball in alcohol and then carefully wipe the surface ” .
Throughout these three example sentences we can see different uses of the word embeber , even when they are within the same scope. Such is the case of the first two, since embedding an ingredient to affect the general result of a recipe is not the same as doing so with a finished product, such as a cake. In the first, the action can make the mixture more homogeneous, regardless of the final consistency, while in the second it is carried out to facilitate the consumption of a dish.
The third sentence is not about softening a product, nor about a culinary dish. The cotton is soaked (or soaked ) in alcohol with the intention of cleaning a device, in this case a screen, but the goal is to retain the alcohol, since this is the product that will be used to remove the dirt, and the piece of cotton is little more than a channel or a medium.
Other meanings
The idea of embedding, on the other hand, is used to refer to putting or enclosing one thing inside another . It can even be used to refer to incorporating an immaterial element into another .
When a part of an object is gathered into itself to make it smaller or when something shrinks, it can be called soaking: “I should soak the dress so that it doesn't become so long” , “Hot water can soak certain textile fibres” .
To give oneself passionately to a activity o read and learn deeply about a issue son otras acciones que pueden mencionarse como embeber: “If time permits, I will immerse myself in Italian art during the trip”.
Embedding computer elements
In the field of technology , finally, embedding means inserting code from one programming language into another . Thus, it is possible to insert content from one platform into a different one: embedding a YouTube video in WordPress , embedding a Flickr image in Blogger , etc.
To soak a cloth in alcohol is to soak it.
In this case we are faced with a language defect, more precisely a borrowing, since the term already existed but did not have the specific meaning of its current equivalent in English, embed . In any case, if we focus only on the action it represents, it is a very common one in current web page design, where many elements from different origins are combined, which must coexist and, more importantly, communicate with each other to offer a coherent experience to the user.
Embedding an element into another may seem easy from a practical point of view, if we only take into account the steps to follow in certain accessible programs. But fundamentally, the need is to make compatible two things that were created in different languages, that have different needs and that, in principle, do not know how to communicate with each other . In other words, embedding a video in a page programmed in HTML, for example, requires the use of an interface that allows them to coexist and that gives the user the impression that they are a whole, a unit.