When I was small, my father owned a Gloucester fishing dory, such as the cod fishermen used. Instead of having the cast iron "oarlocks" shaped like a "y" with a pin that went into the gunwale, it had what my father called "thole pins", a pair of sturdy oak dowels, between which the oars rested.
Yes, the building of boats is one of the simple, but impressive, pleasures.
Are you writing here that tholes are the equivalent of 'thowels'? I'll check it out...
Yes. I just did. And what a terrific coincidence! Remember our recent discussion about fat and thumbs and all that jazz? Well, it turns out that your etymological bounty also ties into thole and thowels. Read this from MW:
"Etymology: Middle English tholle peg, from Old English thol peg, thole for an oar; akin to Middle Low German dolle thole for an oar, Old Norse thollr peg, Greek tylos callus, knob, Sanskrit tavti he is strong -- more at THUMB"
So there we have the thumb again--and we know that the thumb ties into all those fat words!
Dear WW: I wonder if 'dowel' is related:
dowel
SYLLABICATION: dow·el
PRONUNCIATION: doul
NOUN: 1. A usually round pin that fits tightly into a corresponding hole to fasten or align two adjacent pieces. 2. A piece of wood driven into a wall to act as an anchor for nails.
TRANSITIVE VERB: Inflected forms: dow·eled, dow·el·ing, dow·els also dow·elled, dow·el·ling, dow·els
1. To fasten or align with dowels: table legs that are doweled to the top. 2. To equip with dowels.
ETYMOLOGY: Middle English doule, part of a wheel, perhaps from Middle Low German dovel, plug, or from Old French doele, barrel stave (diminutive of douve, from Late Latin doga, vessel, from Greek dokh, recepticle, from dekhesthai, to take; see dek- in Appendix I).
I don't see anything in your dowel background list that would suggest that dowel and thowel were ever related through a common ancestor-word!--although the words from independent families developed to sound similar.
jheem might know...
However, it's interesting that they do sound so much alike and that they function together.
Like most of the 'th~' words, you can expect a Viking influence on the language. OED also posits a possible relationship with dowel.
OE. þol(l, corresp. to ON. þollr, Norw. toll, tulle, Sw. (år) tull, Da. (aar) tol; MLG. dolle, dulle, dole, doule, LG. (Brem. Wbch.) dolle, dulle, EFris. dolle, dol, MDu. dolle, Du. dol(l. Ulterior etymology uncertain. In ON. þollr was also ‘fir-tree’, poet. ‘tree’ generally: the connexion of sense is not clear. The history of the Eng. word also shows a hiatus during nearly the whole ME. period.
The late altered forms thoule, thowle, and 19th c. thowel, may be influenced by doule, dowle, dowel.]
1. A vertical pin or peg in the side of a boat against which in rowing the oar presses as the fulcrum of its action; esp. one of a pair between which the oar works; hence, a rowlock.
c725 Corpus Gloss. (O.E.T.) 1820 Scalmus, thol. c1000 Voc. in Wr.-Wülcker 289/9 Scalmus, ðoll. 1611 Cotgr., Scalme, a Thowle; the little peg whereby the oare of a Skiffe is staied. 1624 Capt. Smith Virginia 62 In stead of thoules wee made stickes like Bedstaues. 1697 W. Dampier Voy. round World (1699) 35 Straps+through which they put their Oars in rowing, instead of tholes or pegs. 1769 Falconer Dict. Marine (1789), Autarelles, the thoules or rowlock-pins of a galley. 1827 Roberts Voy. Centr. Amer. 178 These oars are secured to the thowel by straps of raw hide. 1847 Longfellow Evang. ii. ii. 102 The sound of their oars on the tholes had died in the distance. 1857 P. Colquhoun Comp. Oarsman's Guide 29 The row~lock is composed of 3 parts; the thauel, against which you row [etc.]. 1862 Whittier Cry Lost Soul iv, The guide+drops his oar against the gunwale's thole.
2. A pin or peg in general: spec. a. A pin by means of which the shafts are fastened to the carriage or axle of a cart, etc. b. The handle or ‘nib’ of a scythe-snathe.
Not all words in th- are necessarily from (Old) Norse. English tends to have th where German has d; cf. thing ~ Ding, think ~ denken, thirst ~ Dürst, etc. One important word, the third person plural pronoun is from Norse / Danish, they replaced the earlier hie. I think the OED is suggested that the alternate spelling thowel for the earlier thole was influenced by the spelling dowel. But it may be connected, especially if dowel is from Dutch or Low German where the th ~ d correspondence holds, too. Thole's a great word non-the-less.
Oh, I forgot to mention murder above. This is not what one should expect from this word which is cognate with German Mord and murderer with Mörder. It should be, and we see examples in early modern English of murther, but somehow it ended up as murder. Whether from a different English dialect or from some transchannel crossover.
In reply to:
Middle Low German dolle thole for an oar
Oh, heavens! I hadn't even read carefully enough my own post!
In my first post, I mentioned "dory", which cod fishermen
preferred because of its outstanding seaworthiness. It was flat bottomed, with high pointed stem and stern. Some skiffs
with blunt sterns that can mount an outboard motor can have vaves break over the stern when going downwind. It occurred to me to look up etymology of "dory", and I was much surprised to find it came from the Caribbean, just as "canoe" did.
dory2 ['dɔːrı]
noun
(plural: -ries) (U.S. and Canadian) a flat-bottomed rowing boat with a high bow, stern, and sides
[ETYMOLOGY: 18th Century: from Mosquito (an American Indian language of Honduras and Nicaragua) dóri dugout]
But the fishing dory is nothing like a dugout, which could not have the pointed high stem and stern.
Here's a URL with some pictures of modern dories. The stern of the one we had was just like the bow.
http://www.oldwharf.com/ow_dory.html
"Mosquito (an American Indian language of Honduras and Nicaragua)
...Mosquito was a language full of buzz words?
Oh, heavens! I hadn't even read carefully enough my own post!
Yes, the older I get the more I notice words that creep in to sentences while I wasn't looking. All those highs and lows and middles and olds make for dense reading.
Dear jheem: during my morning walk, I remembered the almost obsolete word "thill", the two shafts which are on each side of a horse pulling for instance a trotting horse sulky.
I wonder if it is a distant cousing of 'thole'.
> Not all words in th- are necessarily from (Old) Norse. English tends to have th where German has d
True, yes. But my understanding is that at least part of this process (of change from d to th) was driven by the collision of ON influenced language north of the Danelaw with the Germanic tribal languages to the south. Is that about right?