Talk:Tenterhook

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Comments[edit]

(Comments perhaps limited to concern about effect of grammatical number)[edit]

(heading retrofiitted 17:21, 22 April 2019)

There should be two articles here... Sunspeck 03:58, 11 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

   Sunspeck, who also did some kind of move, was perhaps concerned over the use of a single article to cover both the usages "tenterhook" (one of the bent-metal pieces used en masse in wool-processing) and "[on] tenterhooks" (a psychological metaphor implicitly evoking the tension (classical mechanics) experienced by the aforesaid wool). Other editors may have been quicker than I at doping out said metaphor; que sera.
--JerzyA (talk) 04:34, 8 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

A picture is really worth a thousand words in this case...Ohnoezitasploded (talk) 18:26, 18 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

   (Perhaps an observation that deserved indentation below our colleague Sunspeck's, even that 3 years later and now a decade ago.
--JerzyA (talk) 04:34, 8 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

(Matters venturing at least a bit further afield)[edit]

(Probably a colleague's explication of one justification for treating sing & plu together ....??)[edit]

   A fuller used TENTERHOOKS as far back as the fourteenth century in the process of making woollen cloth.
   The woven cloth still contained oil and some dirt from the fleece. The fuller - also known as a tucker or walker, or a waulker in Scotland - cleaned the woollen cloth in a fulling mill.
   She then dried it carefully outdoors to prevent shrinkage by placing the wet cloth on a large wooden frame, known as a tenter - from the Latin tendere, meaning to stretch. She stretched the cloth upon it using hooks or nails driven through the perimeter of the frame. The cloth perimeter, thus fixed, would dry; its shape and size maintained by the tenter.
   At one time, a common sight in manufacturing areas would be to see tenter-fields filled with these frames.
   By the mid-eighteenth century the phrase, on tenterhooks came into use to mean being in a state of uneasiness, anxiety, or suspense, stretched like a cloth on the tenter. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 116.212.213.237 (talk) 07:05, 4 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
On reflection, it appears that this colleague may have been unaware of wiki format-controlling features, and relied on a single CR to separate their short 'graphs. I've taken the liberty of introducing, just above, wiki-indentation, for greater clarity and fluency, into their (auto-)signed text. (When I was introduced, on "manual" typewriters, to indentation, probably not too much after turning 6 in 1952, they had clips for manual placement into slots on the back of the device, to create "tab[ulation] stops" & provide some of the effects attainable in some environments with the perhaps now-forgotten ASCII tab characters. Wiki-indentation can be argued to be either more or less "friendly", but if ya don' know it, you won't guess how to do it!)
--JerzyA (talk) 05:53, 8 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

(Leather: a non-sequiamur?)[edit]

What sources are there for the use in Tanning (leather)? I have had a quick look but not found much.SovalValtos (talk) 19:32, 1 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

"Stenter" listed at Redirects for discussion[edit]

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Stenter. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. Roxy, the PROD. . wooF 12:57, 22 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]