Tenterhooks

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A true story--two years ago, I was buying R a computer for Christmas. I didn't know when it would arrive exactly and so the day before the holiday, I warned him that "Santa" might not deliver. He told me to check the internet and find out, and when I told him that such a thing was not possible, he went to his grandmother. She took the invoice number from me, and used it to find the tracking number and then the tracking number to find out exactly where his computer was and then that his present would be there before the end of the day. It blew my mind. But not his--he knew, with a faith unbroken by experience, that all knowledge was available to us, if we just knew the way to look for it.

Directly quoted:

Tenterhooks were used as far back as the fourteenth century in the process of making woollen cloth. After the cloth was woven it still contained oil from the fleece and some dirt. A fuller (also called a tucker or walker) cleaned the woolen cloth in a fulling mill, and then had to dry it carefully or the wool would shrink. To prevent this shrinkage, the fuller would place the wet cloth on a large wooden frame, a "tenter", and leave it to dry outside. The lengths of wet cloth were stretched on the tenter (from the Latin "tendere", to stretch) using hooks (nails driven through the wood) all around the perimeter of the frame to which the cloth's edges (selvages) were fixed so that as it dried the cloth would retain its shape and size.^[1] At one time it would have been common in manufacturing areas to see tenter-fields full of these frames.

By the mid-eighteenth century the phrase "on tenterhooks" came into use to mean being in a state of uneasiness, anxiety, or suspense, stretched like the cloth on the tenter.

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