Love me tenter
What are tenterhooks? Are they the hooks you use to hook your tent onto the pegs? Next time some boring bastard is boring me by talking about cars or snowboarding or local issues, I’m going to interject with “please, don’t go on - I’m off tenterhooks here.”
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 30th, 2006 at 9:23 AM and filed under New stuff. Trackbacks are closed.
But first let me tell you how driving to the snowboard shop will affect our housing market.
Posted on 30-Mar-06 at 9:35 am | PermalinkAccording to my good friend Google:
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ont1.htm
This may be the answer.
The article points out that some people now say “tenderhooks” which sounds better to me.
My other favourites:
“Baited breath” instead of “bated”. Breath like fishing bait?
“One foul swoop” instead of “one fell swoop”. The former is what the pigeons do to our car.
Posted on 30-Mar-06 at 10:26 am | PermalinkI’ve just realised I’m turning into Nigel Rees (http://www.qunl.com/reesbio.html) and am going to go and great my testicles with barbed wire until death releases me.
Posted on 30-Mar-06 at 10:28 am | PermalinkLol or perhaps grate them
Posted on 30-Mar-06 at 10:28 am | PermalinkAccording to Wikipedia:
Fullering: A fuller is the worker who does the job. In the process, fuller’s earth was used. (This is a soft earthy material occurring in nature as an impure hydrous aluminium silicate.) The cloth might also be washed. After washing, to prevent shrinkage and wrinkling, the cloth would be stretched on great frames known as tenters and held onto those frames by tenterhooks. It is from this process that we derive the phrase being on tenterhooks as meaning to be held in suspense. The area where the tenters were erected was known as a tenterground.
Posted on 30-Mar-06 at 12:41 pm | PermalinkI knew that. Really I did.
Posted on 31-Mar-06 at 4:26 am | PermalinkWhat bobble said.
Posted on 01-Apr-06 at 5:07 pm | PermalinkBut with snippets from my (half-hearted) BSc Archaeology dissertation on medieval industries.
…..
Probably best to stick to what bobble said.
Brudda Moobz: I used to have one of Nigel Rees’s “Graffiti” books, which amused me no end as a teen.
Bobble: I wouldn’t trust wikipedia. Someone could have deliberately written a misleading entry on the subject of tenterhooks, just to make people like you and me look like big fools in the presence of authorities on medieval industries such as Mikeachim (medieval?)
Posted on 02-Apr-06 at 7:35 am | PermalinkOh, come come come. Just because I have letters after my name signifying my membership of an elite percentage with their cultural heads above the water, pshaw, I’m sure the Common Man has any number of opinions worth sharing through his ‘Wiki’ medium. Haw.
Posted on 03-Apr-06 at 10:55 am | Permalink(I really wasn’t kidding about my dissertation’s utterly non-innovative, synthetic mediocrity. Despite my original tone of false modesty ;) )
That Mikeachim. He sounds a right twat.
Posted on 06-Apr-06 at 11:10 am | Permalink