Misunderstood...

If I spoke the phrase, lifting magnets, to you, what would your first reaction be?  What would the phrase make you think of?

If you work in certain industries, you'd have no trouble identifying the true meaning of the expression, but if, like me, you don't work in such industries, then lifting magnets might easily make you think of going around lifting magnets, literally - say off the fridge, or from a school science lab, or from anywhere else you might find magnets just lying around.  Or it might mean, pinching them from a shop that sold them.

This is one of the joys of language, that what you hear or read isn't always what was meant by the writer.  It can be confusing, but usually the context will help to clarify.  However, when you get a phrase thrown at you out of nowhere, the lack of context allows your imagination to think of something that isn't the true meaning at all.

On the other hand, sometimes even the context doesn't help.  I've never forgotten how, when I was still a child (perhaps at Intermediate level, but a good reader) I came across a particular expression which was unknown to me in the opening chapter of a book. The author told us that the it had been snowing heavily outside, and his hero had decided to go out in the snow for some reason which I've now forgotten, but he wanted to do it secretively.  So he looked in on his parents, who were dead to the world, and then snuck out.  I was appalled.  He saw that his parents were dead, and yet he still went off as though nothing had happened!  I refused to read any more of the book.  If the author was so callous as to let his hero wander around in the snow on some adventure without being concerned that his parents were dead, then I didn't want to read the rest of the story.  I still have something of a recollection of the emotion I felt about this particular phrase that day. I can even visualise where I was in my house.

Most authors strive for clarity; some of them are better at it than others.  But no author can be expected to deal with every way in which his readers will misread his or her story

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.