Every June, EMGW holds a social gathering featuring an all-member show-and-tell session, lots of appealing food, sparkling conversation, and election of officers for the coming year. Collectively, we refer to the officers as the Executive Board.

Hold on just a minute, there. We are woodworkers, and we know what a BOARD is. How did a piece of lumber come to refer to the policy-making group in an organization? You can thank me later, because I decided to consult Claud AI to seek an answer. The search helped to expand my vocabulary and revealed other interesting connections between woodworking and organizational life. It also underscored just how much the English language developed in a timber-centric world.

Here is part of Claude’s answer to my question “How did Board come to refer to the leaders of an organization?”:

The story traces back to a surprisingly literal origin — a piece of wood.

In Old English and early Germanic languages, bord meant a plank or flat piece of wood. This gave rise to the word being used for a table (a flat wooden surface), which is why we still say "room and board" (lodging and meals at a table) and "above board" (visible on the table, hence honest).

By the medieval period, "board" had become a common metonym for the table around which important people sat to conduct business or deliberate — the same way we still say "the head of the table." Official councils and committees literally gathered around a large wooden table, and so the board (the table) began to stand in for the people sitting at it, much the same way "the Crown" can refer to a monarch or "the bench" refers to judges.

So, we now know what a metonym is.  Other metonyms that might interest EMGW members include “the chair” (the presiding big shot who has earned the honor of sitting in a chair rather than on a more modest bench or stool) and “the Cabinet” (the group of lesser big shots who, in earlier times, met in a secluded private room).

Cabinet (probably from early French) has referred to a portable box for precious objects since the mid-1500’s. It was not long before it came to mean a chamber where private discussions might take place, and by 1604 it experienced a metonymic metamorphosis whereby The Cabinet identified the people holding those discussions.

Once you start looking, woodworking has contributed a great deal to our language. Here are a few more illustrative examples:

• What does your political party or candidate stand for? Just refer to their platform, including planks that spell out positions and aspirations on specific topics of the day.
• Why is a group of authorities called a panel? Claude explains: “Panel comes from the Old French panel and Latin panellus, a diminutive of pannus, meaning a piece of cloth or a flat section — but it quickly came to refer in medieval English to a flat piece of wood, a board or plank, particularly one inserted into a frame (as in a door panel or wall panel)….
  “In medieval English law, a panel was the piece of parchment — or later a flat writing surface — on which the sheriff wrote down the names of prospective jurors summoned for a case….
  “So the chain runs: flat piece of wood → flat writing surface → document listing names → the people on the list → any assembled group of experts.”
• Repeated practice or training is sometimes called a Drill.
• Finally, though most of us begin a project with planks and boards, the material from the lumber yard or home center is sawn or split from a log, a word with many uses.  Again, I’ll lazily turn to Claude for the explanation:
  “in the age of sail, navigators needed to measure a ship's speed through the water, and they did it with a remarkably simple device — a flat piece of wood, roughly wedge or pie-shaped, tied to a long rope that had knots tied in it at regular intervals. The wooden float was thrown overboard off the stern, where it would sit relatively stationary in the water while the ship moved away from it. A sailor would count how many knots passed through his hands in a fixed amount of time (measured by a sandglass), and that count gave the ship's speed — which is precisely why we still measure nautical speed in knots today.

“That wooden float was called a log — simply because it was a chunk of wood, in the same way any piece of timber might be called a log. The measurements taken with the log were recorded at regular intervals in a book, which naturally became the logbook, later shortened to simply log.

“From seafaring the term spread to any systematic record of activity over time — a captain's log, a flight log, a log of phone calls — and then into computing, where we log in, generate logs, and record error logs, probably without ever picturing that little wooden float drifting in the wake of a sailing ship.”

With that, I am logging off for the summer. The next MTCO will appear in September.