I like the chairs but didn't get one the whole time.

[seryn]

I really dislike children. Sadly one of my nearby knitting groups is almost entirely children. I never get any knitting done when I go. It's really annoying to constantly be asked to teach. Not just give advice but to show by doing-for.

I learned to knit with a pair of chopsticks, a book from the library and a skein of yarn I got for less than a dollar. It took me ages to figure it out on my own. I know that I should pass along that knowledge because there's no sense in everyone re-inventing wainrightry after seeing their first wheel. But at the same time, it is incredibly frustrating to see people who do nothing to practice or learn on their own expecting me to give of my time to help them.

I don't go very often because of this. Today was my first time back in 6 weeks. Got chided. Feel really resentful.

I don't mind showing someone something once. "I learned to cast on, but saw someone doing it another way, can you show me that one too?" But then I expect that person to show the next person. How did I get to be the expert? I've been doing it longer but I don't have any secret knowledge that wasn't easily found.

I guess I shouldn't go back since I don't enjoy myself. I do feel useful, but the mule-load of resentment I bring home hardly seems a worthy purchase of my time.

If I could share the "teaching" responsibility I wouldn't mind so much. I could teach the mothers and they could take home enough extra skills to help their children if there were rough patches. I like being useful, but I hate feeling used. And that's what I feel when I'm asked to kneel for 20 minutes and finish a random stranger's kid's project.

I wanted to go to the knitting group because it says all experiences welcome and it's nearby.

Comments

[thistleingrey]

Indeed, wainwrights took apprentices, generally long-term.

[seryn]

Oh. You'll be proud of me, I taught someone a new word yesterday and in the process looked it up myself to discover it wasn't pronounced how I thought it was (and how the actor on Nero Wolfe did it). puerile.

I'd heard it "pure-isle" and supposedly it's "pure-eee-ell"...

I was a little concerned I'd mis-chosen the suffix for wainwrightry and was just dreading when I saw the email notice. I thought, "Damn, she's going to tell me that's not a word." I'm rather pleased right now. Thanks.

[thistleingrey]

I've heard "pweh-rill" most often.

:) I wasn't going to mention, but since you have, no, "wainwrightry" is not a word.

[seryn]

pweh-rill would make some sense.

There needs to be a word for what wainwrights do. "Wheel-making" seems like a definition and not the kind of word you'd end up with from the era where there were chandlers who made candles and coopers who made casks. Making barrels or casks is referred to as "coopering". So does that mean wainwrighting, the gerund form, is the correct noun for what wainwrights do? Honestly it seems like that would have been a good time for an irregular noun form. Someone should have consulted me via time travel so the language would sound good to my ear hundreds of years after it mattered in regular life.

Of course, now that I look it up... wainwrights built wagons. Wheelwrights made wheels, but looking up wheelwright suggests wainwright is an alternate variance. Wainwright is synonymous with cartwright. hmm.

*pauses* o FREAKISH! I'd always thought it was "playwrite" not "playwright", though honestly that makes more sense with less redundancy. I'd wondered why we have "authors" and not "bookwrites", or, I suppose, bookwrights. I'd been laughing to myself about bookwrites who write books, akin to the woodchuck tongue-twister.

I have completely digressed, but the tangent was brain stretching.

[seryn]

I know where I got wainwrightry. People who are carpenters do carpentry. So people who are wainwrights probably do wainwrightry.

[thistleingrey]

Yes, but -er is how carpent-er-y came about. So also jewelry (stuff purveyed by a jeweler), presbytery, heraldry.

Also, carpenter and jeweler, etc. are borrowed from French, whereas wright is English. :P

[thistleingrey]

Standard dictionaries are unlikely to tell you this in any detail--"wright" is the person who has wrought something, literally, and thus "wright" is a back-formation from the old spelling of a form of "to work" (OE wyrcan or wircan, depending on dialect area, and those initial vowels weren't quite the same then). By the fifteenth century, perhaps under influence from Dutch and Flemish industry in London, the simple past-tense form (preterit) had shifted from "worhte" to something closer to continental German forms, and thus we now have "worked." "Wright" and "wrought" were left as fossils, which is one reason you're having trouble connecting *wrighting to anything: "wrighting" was never a word because the -t encapsulates a finished product (something worked, the way that iron or wood can "be worked" to create an aesthetic object). Something like *wirchende wouldn't occur to most English speakers without historical awareness, but it's a viable earlier spelling for "working."

And yes, "wain" is a wagon: soften the -g- towards -h- and you'll hear that they're originally the same word. The Big Dipper was called the Great Wain for a time.

Half this game is knowing the sounds that certain sounds can become in other contexts (like the -g- / -h-), and knowing when they're unlikely to shift to any other sound. I could go on, but I'd better get back to work.