Embroidering on a theme

As I stitch, my mind frequently wanders away from what my fingers are doing. Recently, it decided, unbidden, to delve into the linguistics of embroidery.  

Up popped idioms like “a stitch in time saves nine” and “to embroider the truth.”   Next to float through were “to needle someone”, “to have someone in stitches”, “stitch someone up” and “sitting on pins and needles.”

And then that conundrum of logistics whizzed into my consciousness. That matter of getting a camel through the eye of a needle being easier than entering into heaven.

I wondered if today’s youngsters, whose parents—must not be sexist -- rarely wield needles, understand these metaphors let alone use them.  

From the distant past of university, I recalled something called a frequency dictionary. These lists rank words by how often they appear in texts of various sorts. And sure enough, Google dredged up several.  To give my stitching fingers a rest, I start surfing, to try my luck.

Well, “needle” appears in Simpsons TV series 66 times. It ranks 3501^st word out of the most used 5,000.   I can’t imagine anyone in that series embroidering. So being irritating and needling someone is surviving.

 In other TV series produced up to 2006, “needle” was used 309 times, making it the 4171^st word.   That’s a relief.  Adults for whom English is their native language are estimated to have a vocabulary of 20,000-35,000 words.

Project Gutenburg, which digitizes and makes available online as many texts as possible, also ranks words.  As I combed the English lists –there are ranking lists for many languages--for embroidery related terms, here is what I learned.  Embroidery terms don’t do so badly. We’re ahead of weaving, potters, and milliners, but behind blacksmiths.  

Ranking	Word
2465	silk
6127	needle
7076	embroidered
9770	yarn
9793	tapestry
9825	blacksmith
9857	embroidery
9862	weaving
9899	woollen
9661	parapet
10566	stitch
12948	threadbare
17343	handicraft
16115	buttonhole
16116	milliner
16275	potter
26859	threadlike

Right. Up until 2006, the embroidery-related words were doing just fine in wider language. How about since then? 

Emboldened, I decided to hit some mainstream newspaper sites. How much more mainstream can you get than the financial press. To my amazement, the Financial Times, published in the UK, spewed out 55 instances of “needlework” appearing in its columns since 2009. Some relate to Kate Middleton’s wedding dress created by the Royal School of Needlework, other’s to Tracy Emin’s embroidered tent, and another to a cross-stitch exhibition in New York. 

The boffins of Threadneedle Street--UK’s version of Wall Street and home to the Bank of England, appear to have an interest in stitching and not just stitching us up! How amazing is that!

Bank of England -- known as The Old lady of Threadneedle Street.

I also learned that there is such a thing as a “needlework policy”.  Too bad it doesn’t have anything to do with promoting embroidery more widely. Nope, a professor at the University of Amsterdam invokes this term to describe small-scale, preventive investments to save communities threatened by climate change.  I get it. “A –stitch-in-time-saves-nine”policy.  “Needlework policy” is more concise and somehow sounds grander than a “stitchery policy.” 

So needlework/embroidery seems to be ensconced in our modern psyche, speech, and usage for a while longer. I hurry out of my attic to report this engaging research to my husband. He listens patiently. 

“Can I conclude you have hit a difficult part of your current stitching project?” he asks astutely.  How well he knows me.