Dr. Metablog

I suspect that I know more about wood than most laymen, partly as a consequence of Uncle Al owning and operating the sawmill for all those years. And then there's my own independent enthusiasm for trees: planting and transplanting, gathering and saving seeds. Nevertheless, The Age of Wood by Roland Ennos presented amateur me with a truckload of brand new information. It's a book that re-tells the history of civilization through the use of wood and wood products. A very good book, well worth the perusal.

Moreover, Ennos introduced me to a number of savory new words — words that no doubt I should have known and which are probably known to true woodophiles but that are novel to me.

For example: the newfangled word anisotropy, which is defined as the property of a material that displays different traits along different axes, as for example lumber, which is much easier to split along its grain than across it. Because wood is anisotropic and so tough sideways, it has many uses that it wouldn't have had if merely isotropic.

Anisotropy, as a collection of sounds, does not appeal to me as much as some of Ennos's gritty, oldfangled words. I am happy to make the acquaintance of the word bodger, which is a wood carver or turner, but specifically a person who makes chairs out of beechwood. What a wonderful word, though, I confess, difficult to work into the conversation. Also hard to insinuate into the daily exchange is futtock, which is a curved piece of timber forming the lower part of the frame of a wooden ship. Futtock should not be confused with its near-neighbor puttock, which is a kind of kite, and a word which Shakespeare uses as an insult. Both futtock and puttock sound vaguely naughty, perhaps because of their proximity to buttock. I also like strake, which is a continuous band of hull planking, and which sometimes sports a rove, which is "a groove along the lower inside edge of each strake." I admit that I had never heard of nacelles, which are the outer casing of an early wooden aircraft engine. I imagine that nacelles are as obsolete as wooden airplanes, as is monocque, a type of construction in which the outer skin carries a major part of the stresses. Who knew?  I was familiar with the word sheave but I didn't know that it also is the rotating wheel inside a pulley. A duogong is part of the network of wooden supports in traditional Chinese wood-frame buildings. 

A trullo is a traditional Apulian drystone hut with a conical roof.

I have actually seen such buildings with my own eyes, but I either never learned or had forgotten their name. A chalumeau is a single-reed wind instrument, a forerunner of the clarinet. Some disrespectful people call a chalumeau a mock-trumpet. A cruck is a piece of curved timber which supports the roof of a building. Steills are, believe it or not, "one of the deep pools or steills in the Tweed," though why the Tweed should have specific word for its pools is a mystery to me.  A tomol is a plank-built boat invented by the Chumash people of southern California. It was "the single most technologically complex watercraft built in North America and as such deserves to be better known." Sometimes "tomol" appears as "tomolo." Both spellings are strange and splendid.