Bob Smalser - a minor critique
Bill Houghton, Sebastopol, CA
>In your otherwise lovely article about chisels in FWW, you say on page 49, speaking of butt chisels, "Butt is an archaic word for hinge."
Tell me, please tell me, that this was evil editors at work.
My Woodcraft catalog lists butt hinges; last I looked (not all that long ago) in the hardware store, Stanley sells the hinges for putting on household doors as butt hinges. The American Heritage� Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition (Copyright � 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company) defines a butt hinge as "A hinge composed of two plates attached to abutting surfaces of a door and door jamb and joined by a pin." And, of course, Lie-Nielsen sells the ever-popular butt mortise plane.
Hardly an archaic usage, and I've never understood the "butt" in the phrase to refer to hinges in general, but rather to refer to the type of hinge, based upon where it sits - where the door and the door jamb (or cabinet frame, though the American Heritage folks seem unaware of small butt hinges) butt up against each other.
I have yet to figure out, by the way, how "butt" in this sense relates to "butt" as a container, as in "butt of malmsey." Another of the mysteries of the English language.