Hand Me Those Pinking Shears. Those WHAT?

In a long ago time, my mother would get upset when I used her pinking shears for a non-sewing purpose.

“But, Mom, I have this assignment and I need to construct a model of the national capitol building and I can’t find any regular scissors.”

“Ask your brothers or your sister where they are. I always put the scissors in the drawer where they belong. Don’t use my pinking shears. And stop cutting up cereal boxes that still have cereal in them.”

Pinking?

For some reason, the name of this tool popped into my mind this week. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember (if I ever knew) why those particular scissors were named “pinking,” and just why one needed such an odd implement for sewing.

First things first. If you’re not familiar with them, below is a pair of pinking shears (left) and a regular scissors. Yes — despite that terminal “s” — a scissors or a shears is singular if there’s one object, as far back as we have the word. Like “deer” and other odd words, native speakers know how many of them there are by the article or modifiers: a deer, some scissors, etc.

What Do Pinking Shears Do?

Those triangular serrations on the shears solve a problem common to tailors. If you cut the edge of a piece of woven cloth in a straight line and don’t hem it, the weave unravels.

By making triangular cuts of a zig-zag pattern, pinking shears interrupt the fabric’s tendency to unravel. Typically, pinking shears are heavier than ordinary scissors, in order to cut through thick fabric.

Very Well. Why “Pinking?”

Now the fun begins.

Without belaboring the point, there was a common Middle English word, variously spelled pingen, pinken meaning “to prick” or “to push.” That word made its way into early modern English as “to pink:” to stab or prick, although it’s now mostly obsolete. Today, if you tell someone you’re going to pink them, they might not take you seriously.

The Middle English came from an Old English word (also variously spelled), pyngan, also meaning “to prick” or “to stab.” Without that –an ending, it’s simply the word “pyng” or “pink.”

We’ve had the word in English since at least 895, when King Alfred used it in his translation of Pope Gregory I’s Pastoral Care** from Latin into Old English.

The history of those words go back through Latin pungere (same meaning) and before that to Indo European, at the dawn of language, to a word, *peuk, that means precisely the same thing as that now obsolete sense of “to pink.” From it, we also have innumerable related words including point, punctual, and puncture.

“Pinking” then is stabbing or pricking, in a slightly different sense than merely cutting.

What About “Shears?”

I’m glad you asked. Yes, let’s be thorough.

Again, we’re going back through the language, this time without the Romans. We’ve been using more or less the same word, “shears,” pronounced the same way — although spelled differently — for at least so long as the English language has been recorded.

Middle English had shere, from Old English, where it was written down as scear or sceare. The Old English scribes used an sc to indicate the sh sound: exactly the same word. It first appears in written form in 725 in a Latin glossary (dictionary) as the Old English translation of Latin forfex: “scissors.” Alfred also used the word in Pastoral Care in 895. The same word, intact, across 13 centuries.

At about the same time, ancient versions of German, Teutonic, Dutch and possibly Norwegian had a similar word, all stemming from a prehistoric Indo European word, *sker: “to cut.”

A Step into the Poetic Imagination

As any speaker of another language trying to learn English will tell you, it’s an infuriating language.

Take “shears” or the verb, “shear.” Those words alone have several meanings. Then there’s the homophone, “sheer,” with several entirely unrelated meanings.

Another ancient meaning for that Old English scear is “ploughshare.” That makes sense. A ploughshare shears through sod and soil.

Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote some of the most remarkable of all English poetry. His poem, “The Windhover” — at least the opening lines — are familiar and oft quoted.

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air ….

The final stanza begins with this all-but-impenetrable phrase:

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion shine.

A sillion is the the line of overturned earth a plough cuts, lifts, turns and leaves behind. Thus, what Hopkins is saying is that even simple (sheer) effort (plod) can result in the shine of light on the curve of earth carved up by the smooth plough blade.

But he does something incredibly clever: He uses the word “sheer,” — homophone for shear — OE scear — which we now know means “ploughshare.”

It’s a pun on modern and ancient English, hidden away by a master.

Do you use pinking shears? Leave a comment.

^**For sticklers, the Latin title of Gregory’s work was Liber Regulae Pastoralis (The Book of the Pastoral Rule), but Alfred named it Pastoral Care, and thus it is in English. Don’t contradict the King.

© Brad Nixon 2020. Photo courtesy J. Nixon, copyright 2020, used by kind consent. Etymology sources: A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, J.R Clark-Hall, Wilder Publications, 2011; The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th edition, Houghton Mifflin, New York 2000; Compact Edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English, Oxford University, 1971; Cassell’s New Latin Dictionary, Cassell & Co. Ltd./Funk & Wagnall’s, 1968.