well i saved it for years, now with the recent move i don't know where it is or if i even have it anymore. i tried to use it in english class to show the kids what seersucker was when the story talked about the man wearing a seersucker suit or what a suit made of serge was like. wasted effort, so i put the box away in a safe place. you know what that means....it is safe from me ever finding it again. but in that box are samples of different types of wool. if i could find it i could drag them out as examples. wool--after being stolen from the sheep--is carded and processed into different types. if you want the material to be long wearing and durable you use the longest fibers to make the cloth. there will be no little fuzzies sticking out all over to make those nasty little pills--hence the finished product will have a "hard" feel. now what to do with all the little fuzzies. our calvinistic heritage really won't let us waste anything. so we weave it togeather to make flannel which has a very soft finish. however, as it turns out, other natural fibers also come in different lengths. the longer lengths of any fabric are always more durable and more expensive. so anyway, what kinds of materials are made from very short cotton fibers?---flannel. confusing. with all the words in the english language you would think they could come up with more specifc words---that is too hard. nah...that is too hard and no one would learn the new words anyway. the kids have it figured out---you just take the old words and give them new meanings to harass the old people.
the exception to the making of new words is in the tech world. for some perverse reason all the techy people find great pleasure and humor in crunching togeather letters and old words to make new words. i have to admit i find the new words fun. this crunching originated--i know because i had to do it, because you only had a limited space dictated by machine architecture to name files. so if you had to name a file quiz for chapter three section one of history--you might name it hc3s1q, and you would know what it was, but it would not be readily apparent to anyone else. the latest crunch words in wired include carbage (carbohydrates + garbage) and Kruegerware (ie- browser-hijacking software that, like freddie krueger, just won't die).
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every teacher needs a little box of samples! and then after 20 years of teaching a kid will say "so thats what flannel looks like" but it won't really be what flannel looks like because after 2,000 kids have felt it it looks more like a soil sample than a clothing sample.
wow. i didn't know that there was a wool flannel. our shirts are definately not flannel. they are a hard wool that doesn't pill and the tag claims 100% wool.
as for new words and old words...ya the new words are partially to confuse old people i suppose, but old words are confusing too.
take two instances, grilled cheese and SOS. keith recently posted a comment on a blog that said he used to think that it was girled cheese. and honestly for a long time i was confused too. i suppose that in part this is due to the fact that vegetarians don't do a lot of grilling so we don't encounter that word much. it was several years into school that i came to realize that it was not girled (keith was disappointed when he found out it wasn't such). SOS is a confusing term/word because we of today use so many acronyms that we assume it is an acronym. when i hauled out the big unabridged dictionary i was stunned that it didn't say what the letters meant. turns out that SOS is an acronym, but not for anything related to the distress signal. in fact it was arbitary distress signal agreed upon in 1912 for morse code. confused me for a day or so.
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