of troy, it is MEANT to be that this discussion is going on between you and me!! And who knows who else may have a word with which to wash this fabric.

Fabric. Your last word. There you are talking about shingles and roofs and tin and all that, and you move back to seersucker...

And, well, you're just not going to believe what I'm about to tell you, but it's true!! I was sitting at the Hungry Bear this morning waiting for my daughter, the cook there, to bring me breakfast, just reading the condensed OED at the bar, as word nerds are wont to do at breakfast bars, right? Anyway, I read the definition for fabric--big deal, huh?--until my eye caught sight of the second definition, which I never realized till this morning at the Hungry Bear:

fabric: walls, roof, and floor of a building

Now, have you at least, of troy, ever heard anybody, in real life, internet, or detective fiction, refer to the structure of the building, in earnest, as "fabric."

"I examined its fabric, and discovered, to my dismay, a leak in the attic."

I would have thought fabric was being used poetically, honest to goodness, but here I discover this morning in the unaffected fabric of the Hungry Bear that fabric is a bona fide word for the built structure itself.

Live and Learn,
Wordwind