Names and Naming systems

As I was growing up in the 1950s my father taught me the names of all the tools he used as an electrician as well as how to use tools for building houses, including electrical wiring and also tools to fix cars with and showed me how to change tires, change spark plugs, change doors, change oil pans when you hit a rock with one and it leaked and to change shoe brakes(there weren't disc brakes then or radial tires). So, as I learned tools there were pliers, wire strippers, hammer, 1 horsepower drill with auger bit for putting romex or flex cable to put wires through for wiring houses and for cutting wire off there were dykes. Dykes!?

Well. As a child I didn't know that there were other meanings for the name of this tool, so I just accepted it as a tool name.

However, last night a wooden pole that carried our street number and an ornate several hundred dollar new lighting fixture on it blew down in a storm and broke. I was delivering 4 girls (including my 15 year old daughter) back through the intense storm at about midnight last night from their school Dance that their class had sponsored and decorated for. So, I was trying to get the broken lamp off the driveway and needed some dykes. I didn't know where mine were so I asked my son innocently in front of the girls. "Son, do you have any dykes?" Immediately I realized my mistake and my daughter said, "Can't you just use pliers?" and I said, "These aren't pliers because all they do is cut." And I realized I had just innocently put my foot even deeper into my mouth and I started to feel bad because of the strangeness at midnight. So, I said, "Well. I guess a more polite name would be nippers for this tool that I needed right then." So, to make a long story short I never found my dykes or nippers but I did find a pair of tin snips which did the trick. So I turned off the front lights so I wouldn't have a problem with getting shocked or with arcing in the rain and blowing out a circuit breaker. And I put on my rubber jacket for working in the rain without getting wet and took the tin snips out and cut the line and dragged the large ornate now broken and expensive lighting fixture into my garage and left the wooden pole in the front yard but off of the driveway. Now that the rain has stopped for now it is now 11:50 the next morning I can take some black electrical tape and tape off the two cut ends of the wires so I can still turn on the rest of my outdoor lights for lighting when the family needs it for parking cars and for walking in the front door  at night.

Note: In case you didn't know the word "Dyke" is also a derogatory name for a Lesbian from the deep past. So, last night I was confronted for the first time in my life as to why the name had been given to the tool sometime in the last 500 years as I had never thought about it before. Once again truth is much stranger than fiction.