-ery (was: cutlery)

[Mark Mandel]

Glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for the (putative) reason behind "flatware".

FWIW, K. is male. In editing I removed this reply of his to another comment:

===
...And I fully expect that if it had been a manned checkout no one would
have said anything, it was just that the machine wanted reassurance before
it would let me buy them (since it can't see my grey beard).
===

m a m

On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 6:59 AM, Damien Hall <djh514 at york.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> Thanks, Mark, for the research! I found that post very interesting. I've
> just two points to make on cutlery itself:
>
> - K. said she'd never understood 'flatware' as a term for eating utensils,
> since most of them aren't very flat. I once visited Sheffield (still a UK
> centre of steel manufacture and the place whence the best cutlery is
> reputed to come) with some friends, and one of them visited a cutlery
> factory and afterwards brought up this very point. This clearly isn't even
> a direct anecdote, so its value as evidence is shaky at best, but I
believe
> that friend said that the factory had said flatware was so called because
> it was made out of flat pieces of metal which were then shaped (once
cool).
> This would presumably be to distinguish it from other metal products, in
> whose manufacture the molten metal is poured directly into a non-flat
> mould.

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