The nights most important game-Lincoln United

[michael]

Drawing nil-nil at half time

[I am Spartacus]

I thought North feriby would beat them easily.

[michael]

nil -nil final score.

 

A good away point for Lincoln.

 

Out position is serious.

We need points urgently.

 

I can see it all coming down to the Hendon game at end of season.

[Coffin Ender]

I get the feeling you would be disappointed if it didn't.

[michael]

Absolutely not.

I'd love for a change to see the Gate play, where we were not on tenderhooks all the time and looking over our shoulder

[Cookie]

"TenTerhooks" MM.

[JeremyJacobs]

Do you know the origins of the expression "Tenterhooks"

[BlueGate Alan]

Something to do with with the way cloth was stretched in the old days I think JJ?

[BlueGate Alan]

I remember cos I was around lol

[seasidesteve]

something to do with hooking up tents

[Cookie]

ON TENTERHOOKS

[Q] “What’s the meaning and origin of on tenterhooks?”

[A] It’s been so long since anyone has seen either a tenter, or the hooks on one, that the word and the idea behind it are now quite mysterious, so much so that it sometimes appears as on tenderhooks, which sounds as though it ought to make more sense. But at one time, the phrase on tenterhooks would have evoked an image that was immediately understandable.

It comes from one of the processes of making woollen cloth. After it had been woven, the cloth still contained oil from the fleece, mixed with dirt. It was cleaned in a fulling mill, but then it had to be dried carefully or it would shrink and crease. So the lengths of wet cloth were stretched on wooden frames, and left out in the open for some time. This allowed them to dry and straightened their weave. These frames were the tenters, and the tenter hooks were the metal hooks used to fix the cloth to the frame. At one time, it would have been common in manufacturing areas to see fields full of these frames (older English maps sometimes marked an area as a tenter-field). So it was not a huge leap of the imagination to think of somebody on tenterhooks as being in an state of anxious suspense, stretched like the cloth on the tenter. The tenters have gone, but the meaning has survived.

Tenter comes from the Latin tendere, to stretch, via a French intermediate. The word has been in the language since the fourteenth century, and on tenters soon after became a phrase meaning painful anxiety. The exact phrase on tenterhooks seems first to have been used by Tobias Smollett in Roderick Random in 1748.

[BlueGate Alan]

So I was right then Cookie! Remember it from my school days

[I am Spartacus]

Ah was that with young Mr Tobias Smollett then.

 

<img src="/forum/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/forum/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/forum/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" />

[BlueGate Alan]

You remember too then Joseba! <img src="/forum/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />