In a Word . . . tenterhooks

I’m not pernickety, but . . . (there’s a neat word. I must come back to it).

Some things people say jar on my consciousness, much as does a nail drawn across tin. For instance, those who say “ekcetra” instead of “etcetra”, or “pacific” instead of “specific”, or “tenderhooks” instead of “tenterhooks”.

Because, folks, there’s nothing tender about hooks.

To be on tenterhooks means to be in a state of almost painful suspense, such as can happen in those last days before payday when you wonder whether there’s enough in your account to see you through.

Or, if from Mayo, seeing your senior county team once more ascend the ladder of success towards All-Ireland Sunday. Again. Or, if reporting on yet another riot in Northern Ireland, and being caught in a hail of stones, bottles (some full) and steel bolts, wondering whether you can escape injury. Again.

It is what some people set out to deliberately experience, those who completely pass all my understanding when they go into a darkened cinema to view a graphic horror movie. Nuts, who don’t so much suspend their disbelief as seek to have it terrorised out of them.

Their lives must be so dull. Then I know accountants who would never darken the door of a cinema showing a horror movie.

Tenterhooks actually existed and their function has been translated into the word’s contemporary meaning. They involved one of the processes in making woollen cloth. After it had been woven, it still contained oil from the fleece, mixed with dirt. This was cleaned.

Then it had to be dried carefully or it would shrink and crease. So lengths of wet cloth were stretched on wooden frames and left out in the open to dry. It also straightened their weave. These frames were the tenters, and the tenter hooks were the metal hooks used to fix the cloth to the frame.

It does not take a huge leap of imagination to think of somebody on tenterhooks as being in a state of suspense, stretched like that cloth on the tenter.

Tenter is from the Latin tendere, to stretch. It has been used in English since the 14th century. Soon afterwards "on tenters" became a phrase meaning painful anxiety. On tenterhooks seems first to have been used in his novel The Adventures of Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett in 1748.

[ inaword@irishtimes.com ]