The older I get the narrower the field of vision in the windshield before me and the broader the panoramic sights in my rearview mirror.........which simply means that with age memory plays a bigger role in daily living. Not that there's anything wrong with that !! I am truly saddened for those whom Alzheimers has robbed of these fundamentally human pleasures. And this is what makes us different from other animals .... the fact that we can reflect upon past experiences .... recalling them from our hard-drives at will ..... having thoughts about thoughts !! quality fruit-of-the-loom thinking !!..... the very core of philosophical reasoning , contemplation and cogitations. Enough small talk !! Let's get on with the main theme.
As most of you already know so well Fluff and I live in a bubble , so to speak. We speak English at home but as soon as we set foot outside the house we must deal with all others of our milieu in French since we live in a 100% French-speaking area........ no sweat for me though as I have been here for over 45 years now and have worked , loved and lived in " la langue de Molière " all that time and feel very much at ease in these surroundings. However , sometimes while discussing the workings of the English language together.... whether it be a word , an expression or proverb .....or the intricate workings of the language itself .... my mind drifts back to some thing or event in the past ... triggered by some of our "fertile" ( pile on the manure !) conversations. The word " grindstone" and all its possible offshoots came up during one of these chitchats.
My Dad had a huge grindstone very much like the one in the picture above down in the cellar under our house. As a lad I would churn the handle while he would sharpen his axes , hachets , knives , scythes and sickles..... often stopping to dip the hot edges in the water contained in the pan underneath the stone. Quite often he would also hone my skates on the same stone. After each sharpening he would then whip out from his pocket a much smaller , smoother , flat ... rectangular stone , spit on it .... and rub and drag it along both sides of the newly sharpened blades , etc to remove the remaining jagged tidbits of metal. He called it a " whetstone ". Of course , I was very much in the learning process back then so I immediately associated the " whet-" part of the word with the usual meaning of wet .... and since my Dad had spat on the stone before using it.... everything fell into place for me. It was a " wetstone" !! And given the fact that both whetstone and wetstone are homophonic.... pronounced the same way.... I was convinced I had it right until I grew a bit older and heard the word used as a verb and not associated with any backup item such as stone but rather in other completely different contexts.
During the Second World War we had about 300 chickens so on weekends we often had company for supper. The men would congregate on the back stoop downing a few ales or throwing back a stiff belt or two of Fernandez blackstrap rhum while the ladies stayed inside chatting and getting the food ready for the evening meal. Moving freely from one group to the other I listened avidly to both conversations and learned that while the ladies were "whetting" their appetites inside with smoked clams on stale bread and gossiping.... the men outside were " wetting " their whistles with cheap rhum and beer !!
All in all I probably was still mixed up after those experiences and only came to find out the real meaning of " whet" ... and its spelling too .... a bit later on in life ..... even though it had remained stuck in my craw for a number of years.
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