Popular Woodworking 2002-04 № 127, страница 86

Out of the Woodwork

Woodworker Meets Wordworker

What do gambling, medieval wagons and missile warheads have to do with today's woodworkers?

As a professor of English I love words, and, like you, I also love woodworking. Non-woodworking friends consider strange the words we use regularly in our craft, among them "carcass," "cockbead," "dado," "ogee," "rabbet" and others. Where did we get these unusual words? Their origins might surprise you.

Suppose you wanted to make a highboy, a tall chest of drawers usually divided into two sections. First, you should know that highboy has nothing to do with gender. Boy is an English pronunciation of the French bois, meaning "wood"; boisage is French for "woodwork" or "casing."

To make a strong highboy, begin by making a carcass. You can spell this word carcass or carcase. Both spellings are common today and are pronounced the same, "CAR-cuss." As far back as the 13 th century, carcass has meant "a dead body." Nowadays the word is a term of derision: "Get your lazy carcass out of that recliner!" Because carcass means a corpse or skeleton, woodworkers appropriated the term to describe the framework, or skeleton, of a piece of furniture.

One way of making a carcass is using a "dado," an efficient groove method of joinery. Dado is an Italian word related to "die," the cube used in gambling (the plural is dice). Woodworkers took a gambling term to describe the basic cube shape.

By the way, don't use "dado" and "rabbet" interchangeably. And above all, don't misspell "rabbet" as "rabbit." Furry animals have nothing to do with this word's origin. When you ask a salesperson for a rebate on a purchase, you are asking for a reduction in the price. The Old French word rabbat — to reduce or diminish — came almost directly into English to describe the act of reducing the surface of wood or stone. Therefore, "rabbet" and "rebate" are modern English cousins with a common French ancestor.

You might want to embellish your highboy's drawers with a strip of raised, narrow moulding or a band attached to the edges of the drawer front. The proper name for this strip is cockbeading. "Cock" means something that sticks up as, for instance, the cocking-piece of a weapon. Beads, such as on a rosary, usually are found on a strip or in a line. Think of a marksman who "draws a bead" from himself to a target. These two words combine to form cockbeading, a "strip that sticks up."

The raised panels in doors fit between vertical pieces called stiles. This word came into English through the Dutch stijl, meaning pillar or post. Think of a turnstile that you pass through to an athletic event; the turning mechanism rests atop a pillar.

Woodworkers also like to decorate the edge of some surfaces using an "ogee" router bit. An ogee is not an object but a shape. "Ogee" describes an S-shaped curve that you can see if you view your routed edge in profile. "Ogee" derives from the French ogive, a word still in use today to mean an arch. Ogive mouldings join the upper legs of a highboy with the rail at the front of the case. Oddly, the word ogive has been applied to the shape of disparate objects. In the 19 th century, the word described a Gothic arch in a sanctuary and, in the 20th century, it described the profile of the head of a projectile, such as the warhead or topmost point of a missile.

Beginning woodworkers sometimes confuse "muntin" and "mullion" because they look and sound alike and both are related to windows. "Muntin" comes from the French montant, meaning any object that protrudes or rises above the surface, such as a mountain. Hence, a "muntin" is the raised material separating panes of glass in a window or door.

"Mullion" is a variant of muniall, an Old French word derived from Latin meaning "in the middle of" or between. You could

probably use either word without fear of the Word Police coming after you, but I recommend using "muntin" to refer only to strips between glass and "mullion" to strips between any sort of panel such as wainscoting.

Speaking of wainscot, do you pronounce it "WAINS-kaht" or "WAINS-coat?" Dictionaries recognize both pronunciations, but the first seems to be more widespread. "Wain" is an Old English form of the German wagen, meaning "wagon" or "cart," and "scot" comes from the German schot, originally a type of fine oak panel. But what does a wagon have to do with this word? Imagine a medieval wagon partially enclosed with panels separated by stiles, and you should see something resembling the lower portion of a wainscoted room.

Woodworkers pride ourselves in shunning "manufactured" items. But "manufacture" used to mean "made by hand" ("manu-" hand; "fact-" make). Similarly, "artificial" used to mean "made with great skill or art" ("art-" art; "fic-" make). Today it means the opposite.

Definitions and pronunciations change over time. When we understand the origins of woodworking terms, we connect with the artisans of the past, our collective forebears whose ingenuity developed the craft that we enjoy today. PW

Philip Leon is a professor of English at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina; he is the author of four books on literary subjects.

88 Popular Woodworking April 2002