History is woven into language

Remember those heady days, long ago, when we started a new job. We had so many unknown pressures to contend with such as meeting the new boss, feeling apprehensive at meeting new colleagues, getting acquainted to the new processes, practices or procedures and learning the new, in-house language used in the workplace.

All these applied to me when I became assistant keeper of technology in the Bradford museum service in the late 1980s. What was especially daunting and bewildering for me, certainly in those early days, was the array of words and phrases used by the professional staff when speaking about the museum's unique worsted textile collection I was now responsible for.

As time marched on and my experiences with the textile collection grew, I too began slowly to absorb and use these new words and phrases and build up a picture of the lexicon of textile words and phrases which had started to disappear from everyday usage.

What was most peculiar was that some of the words or phrases had come into fashion and remained in constant usage, yet few people knew their origin. It also became apparent that one or two had vanished into obscurity.

Many of the words and expressions I eventually mastered had their origins in my home city of Bradford where for a large part of the 20th century they bought and processed two-fifths of all the wool grown in the world.

As I pondered the lack of research into this subject, I was presented with a booklet Some Textile Terms from Addingham in the West Riding by FW Moody, published in 1950 by the Yorkshire Dialect Society.

This singular work featured words such as "loom", "heald", "reed" and "shuttle". Moody claimed that these words had been passed down from Anglo-Saxon times. What was most surprising was that these were the words my colleagues had been using when I had started my career.

I discovered that the local weavers seeking names for new pieces of mechanism compared them with familiar objects.

So the finger-like pieces of metal between which the loom's tappet rods were held were called "rats' tails".

A mechanism for suddenly stopping the loom was called a "frog".

The piece of metal holding the reed in position was a "duck bill", while the term "dobby" was another name for "dobbin", a patient old farm horse.

The word "harness", Mr Moody noted was being used to describe tackle and gear long before it was used to describe the trappings of a horse.

"When Macbeth expressed his intention of dying with harness on his back, he had no thought of equipping himself like a cart horse."

All these observations had been recorded well over 50 years ago when

the textile industry flourished throughout the West Riding. Now that much of it is gone, was it time to take another look?

Many people have researched aspects of the English language from catch phrases, idiomatic words, dialect to proverbial expressions and slang terms. But no-one had systematically documented words and phrases whose origins were rooted within a textile context.

In the spring of 2007, I set out to collect as many words and phrases as possible. Over the next two years I accumulated a comprehensive collection of intriguing textile words, historical fact and expressions, some of which are still in regular use, while others had fallen latterly out of favour. Even so, when compiling such a dictionary, I realised that certain definitions or explanations provided would always be open to controversy and debate.

Now the book has been published I hope that this modest compilation will give the reader as much pleasure as it has given me and pay homage to the many who used these words – the people who made Bradford the "Worstedopolis" of the world.

On Tenterhooks: a compendium of textile words, terms and expressions

by Eugene Nicholson. Wool Press, 6.99. Email [email protected]

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TEXTILE TERMS

Some of the textiles terms that remain part of the currency of everyday language.

Going batty: Before washing machines, clothes were washed or soaked and then beaten with a wooden board. This rhythmic action could induce drowsiness, hence "going batty".

Full Monty: In the 19th century much of the South American wool clip was exported from Montevideo, Uruguay, to Bradford. Consignments of the wools were traded as "full Montevideo bales", later shortened to "full Monty".

Hearing or playing a medley: In the 18th century a medley was a woollen fabric which had been dyed in its unwashed state.

Reeling off facts: Reeling in spinning mills requires great accuracy. It involves unwinding yarns from bobbins onto a revolving reel to form a hank or skein suitable for dying or converting into balls of knitting wool.