Cutting tools

As soon as you step outside your knowledge zone in terms of language use, you find that English has whole groups of words that mean nothing to you...at least in the context they're found in.

For instance, in the area of cutting tools, there are a whole range of words that aren't in the least bit familiar.  They look like English, but they don't sit in my brain as meaning anything to me.   And these words are just group words - within these groups are even more words that are unfamiliar.

Broaches, indexable, chucking reamers, end mills, face mills are some examples.  As I said, they're all obviously English words, because we can read them without trying to decipher the sounds, but that's as far as it goes - for me.   (Of course, the same things applies to someone who's never done anything musical: faced with words that are commonplace to musicians, they'll struggle to make sense of them.)

Under Broaches, we have keyway broach bushings.  Under the next two headings we have words that are just extensions of the headings, but under 'end mills' [see photo on left for some examples] we have a whole pantheon of interesting tool titles: ball end mills, corner radius end mills, square end mills, to name just a few.  Again the words are familiar, but in conjunction with each other don't mean anything - to me.

Under a heading for 'hand tools' we discover some more intriguing titles: arbor presses (this is an American site I'm looking at), gasket punches, spotters and punches, and more.   I'm sure they'd make wonderful words for a surreal sort of poem....in fact I may give it a try.   I attempted my first Villanelle the other day - that's a poetic form, and you find, if you check out poetic form names, that they're even more obscure than those for cutting tools, and include words that nobody uses in everyday language.