 wearing highland dress including tweed kilt jacket. |
I suppose I had better deal with worsted. First, it is pronounced somewhat eccentrically in Gen. Brit: ˈwʊstəd or ˈwʊstɪd. Well, it is if it means an open-weave woollen cloth. The name comes from Worstead, the village in Norfolk where it was originally manufactured.
For years I have thought that the names of various sorts of fabric bring with them little bits of history. So at the risk of boring the kilts off my readers (perish the thought!) here is the story of one such fabric name. Tweed. The fabric we know by this name today got its name by accident. Apparently, around 1830 a London cloth merchant got a letter from a cloth manufacturer in Hawick (hɔɪk) in the Scottish Borders offering for sale what he called tweel, which is the Scots version of the word twill. Twill is a type of fabric made by passing the weft thread over two or more warp threads. Still with me? Anyhow, the London guy misread the Scottish guy’s handwriting and thought that the cloth was named after the River Tweed, which flows through the Scottish Borders and into England. The merchant bought the cloth and advertised it as Tweed and the name has stuck.
Very nice post, though I find “excentrically” to be a bit ECCentric…
Thanks, Alex.
Apparently one of the only four common nouns spelt with ‘o’ and having the ‘foot’ vowel / ʊ / — the others being ‘bosom, wolf ‘ and ‘woman’. Pity a tiresome homography wasnt avoided by the use of the village’s traditional spelling ‘Worstead’.