IMPLEMENTS OF WORK OR BEHAVIOR?

Last month, while honoring my Dad for Father’s Day, I spoke of the tools he taught me to use. One of those was the coping saw. I remember being surprised by the name of this tool. Until then the word “cope” and its gerund form “coping” was something you did when things were difficult.

Back then, when I was a teenager, I did not rush to look up the etymology of the word. I just asked my dad why it was called “coping”. Guess what? It got its name because its small flexible blade(s) allowed a worker to “cope” when working in tight corners or with disparate materials.

Historically, the root word “cope” has many potential sources. Some barely relevant to the saw: to argue, fight or to bargain, for example which you could argue is what a saw does with the material it is used on, I suppose. But the “cope” garment which is essentially an overly large cape seems pretty far removed from this tool.

Remembering my teenage confusion concerning the naming of this tool, reminded me of the delightful surprises I discovered in a small Scottish town’s museum of farming tools. There I found two instruments that suggested to me they could easily be the source for two words we use commonly today, heckle and hassle.

The first—heckle—was a tool for working with flax and resembled, in my opinion, an Afro comb. In effect it straightened, untangled, or broke apart the flax fibers. Its similarity to a comb, made me think of detangling my own hair, a very painful, irritating job. The jump from irritating in this way to irritating a stand-up comic, for example, seemed reasonable to me. It is right in there with the idiom of “raking” someone over the coals.

The hassle, or possibly hassler, in the old farm implements display looked like a large rake and was used to help clear a field. Its purpose was to pull the tangled weeds, or remains of a long-harvested crop from the field to ready the soil for new planting. Once again, the analogy to a comb works with this tool. But even more compelling is the likely frustration that the worker using the hassle(r) would experience. It is easy to imagine such a worker saying, “My muscles ache from hassling.” His contemporaries would understand what his job had been. Jumping from that to “being hassled” is quite a leap, but not unreasonable. If you are being hassled or “weeded out” from the crowd, is that not like being cleared from a field, with the old farm tool?

I admit my thinking may be stretching the imagination, but often this is how language works. One activity lends its terms to other activities while both are concurrent. Then as techniques change and culture shifts, the original use of the word is lost, leaving only the attributed use.

#EnglishLanguage #EnglishIdioms #Father’sDay