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

Since Dad’s are honored this month, this Kaleidoscope blog will feature my Dad and his use of English.

When I was in college and assigned duty in the theater’s workshop, I often used “Dad words” to ask for a tool. I would point at the object and ask for the “gizmo”, “gadget”, “thing-a-ma-jig”, “doo-hickey”, “what-cha-ma-call-it”, “doo-dad”, or “what’s-it.”

The male students assumed I did not know the actual name of the item because I was female. Furthermore, they believed that I did not use the proper names because, as a female, I had no interest in learning about construction work. They were wrong on both counts. I was able on more than one occasion to startle them with my knowledge, not only of the tool names, but that I did not have to be taught how to use them.

Long before college, my Dad gave me lessons in our backyard. He told me, “Just because you are a girl, it’s no excuse for not knowing how to use tools. Everyone should know which tool is used for what and how to use them.” Then began the almost weekly lessons.

However, when I assisted him while he tinkered on our family car or was in the middle of some home repair job, he would often point in the direction of his collection of tools and ask for the “thing-a-ma-jig’ or one of the other “Dad words” I listed above. I got so used to hearing these requests, they became a part of me.

Then, too, my mind works a bit like my Dad’s. You see, while he was working on a project, his mind was running on ahead to the next steps, perhaps even thinking about what he would do when he finished. With all that thinking going on, he could not be bothered backtracking to locate the tool name. Besides, it was not necessary. That’s why I was there.

#Father’sDay #EnglishLanguage #EnglishIdioms