{"id":1695,"date":"2022-03-23T12:15:49","date_gmt":"2022-03-23T16:15:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/?p=1695"},"modified":"2022-03-23T12:20:40","modified_gmt":"2022-03-23T16:20:40","slug":"word-of-the-week-kerf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/2022\/03\/23\/word-of-the-week-kerf\/","title":{"rendered":"Word of the Week! Kerf"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Table<\/a>For the past month, I have been cutting wood with a table saw, a jigsaw, and a compound miter-box saw. I’m a competent if not expert carpenter. So in this age of high prices for materials, I decided that wooden weather-board siding made at home would be cost-effective and beautiful for a porch we turned into a three-season room.<\/p>\n

This sounds like my blog about rural life, Tractorpunk<\/a>, but I’m not going to focus on DIY here, fun though it is. I’m going to focus on a concept and word that merit wider use.<\/p>\n

As the photo (thanks, Wikipedia<\/a>) indicates, a saw-blade removes material as it moves through wood. In carpentry we call that the “kerf” and if one saws hundreds of boards, as I have done, the kerf adds up in big piles of sawdust.<\/p>\n

Do readers see the potential for a new metaphor here, one as fresh as the smell of sawdust and far better than that once-wonderful cliche “death by a thousand paper-cuts”?<\/p>\n

The OED entry<\/a> on our word traces it to Old English cyrf<\/em>, as well as Old Norse a current Icelandic terms; in Iceland a kerfi<\/em> is a bundle of twigs. All the words refer to a cut, the act of making one, or the result.<\/p>\n

If kerf becomes more widely used, I’d use it this way: what gets lost when cuts get made? Thus: “Remind Mister Horrible that laying off these recently hired workers may appear wise, but the long-term kerf will be bad for our bottom line.”<\/p>\n

What do you think about kerfs and kerfing? How might this word enjoy wider usage without your losing a finger in a table saw? Seriously. Use new words widely, but don’t use any of the tools I mentioned without a mentor. We cannot fix those kerfs.<\/p>\n

Do you have a word or metaphor for this blog?\u00a0 Send them to me by e-mail (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the past month, I have been cutting wood with a table saw, a jigsaw, and a compound miter-box saw. I’m a competent if not expert carpenter. So in this age of high prices for materials, I decided that wooden weather-board siding made at home would be cost-effective and beautiful for a porch we turned … Continue reading Word of the Week! Kerf<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":589,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[87405,40197],"tags":[2522],"class_list":["post-1695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-etymology","category-vocabulary","tag-word-of-the-week"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcsCNV-rl","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/589"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1695"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1699,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1695\/revisions\/1699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}