Red Herring

Red Herring

From time to time my in-box will contain an anonymously authored
e-mail. The brief
content of these messages is supposed to inspire me to write. Last
week's effort,
based on '1992', remains unfinished, taunting me whenever I click on
My
Documents. But I find pressing Delete does not have the same
satisfaction as hurling
a crumpled sheet of inky A4 across the room. And so it stays there
awaiting attention.
A few days ago I received the latest instruction:
"Your next mission is as follows: "against the grain"."
I felt like Jim from Mission:Impossible! only I have not been given a
'should you
choose to accept it' escape clause. Nor, unfortunately, would the
e-mail self-destruct
after five seconds. I needed to mull over this hackneyed old phrase
otherwise all I
would produce would be some depressing tale of life's struggles or a
pun filled poem
about not liking whiskey, neither of which I found appealing.

Last night, shortly before going to bed, I found myself wondering about
the origin of
this phrase. I felt fairly confident it was to do with sawing wood.
Everyone knows it is
harder to cross cut than to cut with the natural flow of the fibre. I
thought I might be
able to write something using a theme of how power tools have made a
carpenter's
life so easy that this clich? must surely be redundant. I heaved out
volume 1 of my
1975 copy of The Shorter Oxford Dictionary (edited by the wonderfully
named C.T.
Onions - who clearly does know his) and looked up grain. This word has
almost a
column and a half dedicated to it, unlike the previous entry 'grail'
that merits barely
an inch and a half. Clearly, there is much to be said for grain.

Tucked in the middle of the narrowly spaced lines of tiny font is
this:

Grain. IV. 4. The longitudinal arrangement of fibres or particles in
wood1565. 5. fig.
(from 2 prec. senses): Quality, nature, temper; inclination, tendency
1641.

Further down the column the origin of 5. is given as:

Crossing the G. of our Nature and Desires BARROW. Phr. Against (also,
contrary to)
the g. Cut prejudice against the g. TENNYSON.

This was a worrying development. The phrase is clearly linked to the
fifth definition
(under part IV) - quality, nature, temper; inclination, tendency and
not, as I had
hoped, the fourth definition - wood. What C.T. Onions fails to tell us
is if the
phraseology of Mr. Barrow or Lord Alfred was inspired through watching
some bloke
they had perhaps had round to ease a sticking front door.

I double checked this information using my smaller, but more modern,
Concise
Oxford Dictionary (1984). It defines 'against the grain' as 'contrary
to inclination'.
This was not what I wanted. I poured myself a large Jameson's and
connected to the
Internet.

Almost immediately I found Tennyson's long poem, 'Love thou thy land,
with love
far-brought'. Twenty four patriotic stanzas of abba rhyming scheme such
as this:

Watch what main-currents draw the years;
Cut Prejudice against the grain.
But gentle words are always gain;
Regard the weakness of thy peers.

Was this the answer? A major idiom of the English language brought
about by a need
to rhyme with gain? No, I am just teasing you but I still needed to
know more. I typed
'against the grain' into Google's search engine. Apparently there are
(about) 837,000
pages on the web that contain the words 'against' and 'grain'. I added
the word
'definition' and tried again. Much better. Only 156,000 to sift through
this time, the
first few of which confirmed the phrase was indeed an idiom and meant
'to do it the
hard way' (as one site phrased it). I realised I was searching the hard
way by not
enclosing my search terms in quotation marks. Typing 'origin "against
the grain"'
produced as few as 4,400 results.

Bizarrely, amongst the first thirty results was 'International Recipes
online'. Did you
know that when making a Thai Steak Salad you must slice the steak
against the grain?
Did you also know the amount of onions should equal the amount of
steak? I would
wager that C.T. Onions doesn't. Red Herring Magazine was another
tempting dish but
it was becoming late so I settled for a page called Against The Grain
and ended up at
www.phrases.shu.ac.uk/meanings/24700.html. In a chart of common phrases
and their
origins it very concisely said "The planing of wood in the wrong
direction causes the
grain to tear rather than lie smoothly." Now, whilst this may be a fact
in the world of
woodwork, if my dictionary deductions are correct this information is
completely
wrong.

This is the problem with the Internet. Although a wonderful source of
information,
95\% of it is utter nonsense written by complete ninnies. I moved on to
The
Conservation Glossary at
www.trp.dundee.ac.uk/research/glossary/wood/html where I
learnt that wood is sold by the cubic metre. It goes on to say "a metre
cube of wood is
a lot of wood." Well, I'm sorry Dundee University, but your page is
littered with
typo's and spelling mistakes and a metre cube of wood is precisely 1m x
1m x 1m. It
is not a lot of wood.

Of more interest, though, is the adze, the forerunner of the plane. The
photograph of
this tool shows it to be similar to a modern day pick. "When using an
adze to square a
log to form a baulk," The language of the woodworking world is alien to
me. "... there
are four basic steps: marking, notching, juggling and finishing."

You see, now we are getting to the crux of my original idea. Back in
the days when
the adze was, literally, the cutting edge of technology, I would
imagine the time
consuming part of this smoothing operation was in the finishing. With
the advent of
power tools, workmen have far more time for juggling. Walk by any
building site and
I guarantee you will see blokes idly pocket juggling as young ladies
fearfully walk by.

Rather taken with the word adze, I popped it into Google in the hope of
further
enlightenment. Imagine my delight when, out of 25,900 results, the very
first was:

Free Daily Horoscope by Adze Mixxe at www.adze.com. Under a heading of
Current
Influence of the Inner Planets it told me:

"New social interactions facilitate new agreements.... Make plans and
goals for the 12
months. Start a new cycle for self-expression, leadership, honor and
glory.... You can
support and encourage the arts.... Develop your stamina and
physique."

Whilst the outer planets will have the following influence:

"Get more power by vowing to become a "master."... Control of others
does not bring
you safety, success or satisfaction. Self-control and
self-transformation is helpful."

I had to sign up to read the whole of my horoscope but I was more
interested in
vowing to become a "master" and so tried to return to Google.
Annoyingly, something
called Referralware had me in its "Automated prosperity follow up" loop
at
www.increase-profits.referralware.com/. I eventually escaped, of
course, but it
intrigued me sufficiently to try something else before continuing my
search. I checked
some other horoscope sites. Sure enough, each one locked me in to a
similar routine. I
suppose the theory is that anyone daft enough to believe horoscopes is
the type these
'earn-easy-money' scam sites look for.

I typed in "master" and was rewarded with 23,600,000 (yes, 23.6
million) results.
These were the first five:

Mastercard
NASA's global change master directory
Ticketmaster
Mastercard
Red Herring Magazine.

I'm sorry? Yes, the same magazine from earlier. An hour ago I had not
heard of it.
Now it has appeared high in the results of two entirely different
searches. Was it a
magazine for master craftsmen or those who do not like cereal products?
No.

"A communications company ... in depth analysis and reporting on the
forces driving
innovation - technology, entrepreneurialism and the financial
markets."

Not a tree or adze in sight. Perhaps I was being sent a subliminal
message? Was this
whole idea of mine designed to distract me from some more useful
activity? Sleeping,
for example. But I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that
any sentence
now I am going to tell you my random clicks led me back to Tennyson and
other grain
related matters. This would bring the article to a rather neat
conclusion wouldn't it?
And it is usual to bring the reader full circle, preferably with a
witty remark. But I am
glad to tell you this did not happen. It would seem contrived and even
more bizarre
than the Red Herring Incident. No, I simply went to bed.

You see, when it comes to one's natural inclinations towards writing, I
sometimes
like to go against the grain.