I’ve spent the last four days trying to think of a topic for today’s post, and failing completely. Only just now, as I sat facing that blank white rectangle in the centre of the laptop screen, did I realise the reason for the blank white rectangle in the centre of my brain. There is an obvious topic for me to write about; it is one that I have been thinking about a lot in the last few days. However, it’s a bit contentious, and a lot serious, and I don’t quite have the necessary moral courage today to accept the challenge it represents. However, at some point in the near future it will probably loom so large that I will no longer be able to avoid it. Watch this space!
Well, if that doesn’t guarantee decent reading stats for the next week or two, I don’t know what will. Meanwhile, I’m forced to dredge up and recycle something I first mentioned in a blog post four weeks ago. You will doubtless remember that, when writing about our new lounge suite, I said:
“We confirmed the choice of fabric from the swatch book (Note to self: research the etymology of ‘swatch’ – such a wonderful-sounding word)”
I did, indeed, the very same week, research the etymology of ‘swatch’, and now, as a public service, I’m going to save you the trouble of doing the same.
Our journey begins in 16th Century Northumberland (not an obvious tourist destination), where ‘swatch’ was a dialect word meaning: ‘a countercheck of a tally’. Now, if only we knew what a tally is, and what, indeed, a countercheck is, in this context, we’d be sitting pretty. As it is, we have traded one obscure word for two, in what doesn’t convincingly feel like progress.
So, let’s tackle ‘tally’ first. We all know, from our mastery of medieval Latin, that ‘’talea’ means: ‘a cutting from a plant, a, rod, stick or twig’. (Interestingly, in Greek. ‘talis’ means ‘a marriageable girl’, with, perhaps, the same associations as ‘Twiggy’ in English.)
In medieval times, it was common practice to record debts by a system of notches cut into a stick (the size and spacing of the notches indicating the size of the debt). This stick was known as the tally. In time, the sum indicated by the notches also came to be known as the ‘tally’. After the notches were cut, the tally would then be split lengthwise in two, so that each half retained the notch marks. One half, the master, would be kept by the creditor and the other half, the countercheck, would be given to the debtor, as a record of the debt. At any time, and particularly when the debt was to be settled, the debtor and creditor could lay their sticks side by side, to check that the two halves matched, thus avoiding any argument about the size of the debt. If one of the two parties tampered with his stick, in an attempt to cheat the other, then, obviously, the two halves would not match, or, as we say, they wouldn’t tally.
By the 1610s, in Yorkshire, the word ‘swatch’ had been borrowed and applied to ‘a tally attached to cloth sent to be dyed’. Presumably, this tally was simply a copy, on paper, of the original retained by the customer ordering the dyeing. This adaptation is an indication of the advance of literacy.
By the mid-1600s, a further meaning had developed: ‘sample piece or strip of cloth cut off for a pattern or sample’, which is, of course, more or less the normal modern meaning.
In a later development, the size and shape of swatches led to the term being borrowed by knitters, with a rather different meaning. In knitting, a swatch is a sample piece of knitted fabric used to determine the gauge of a project. It helps ensure that the finished garment fits correctly and is of the desired size. To create a swatch, you typically knit a small square (often 4×4 inches) using the same yarn and needle size as your project. This allows you to compare the gauge of your swatch with the pattern gauge, ensuring that your finished piece will match the designer’s specifications.
One of the sources I looked up online including a graphical representation of the frequency of usage of the word ‘swatch’ over time. When I first looked at this graph, I was puzzled as to the astonishing increase in use of the term starting around 1988.
However, a few moments’ reflection were all that was needed for me to realise the explanation. In the 1970s and 1980s, Japanese companies such as Seiko and Citizen used quartz technology to threaten Swiss dominance of the watchmaking industry. In response, in 1983, Ernst Thomke, Elmar Mock, and Jacques Müller established a new company to produce trendy, Swiss, quartz watches to appeal to the younger market, and called the company Swatch. It is this company’s success that is responsible for the uptick in the graph above.
It is amusing that a name that was doubtless intended to sound modern and trendy should also be a word with such a long pedigree. The moneylenders of early-16th-Century Northumberland could have no idea that their neologism would enjoy a new lease of life 475 years later. Such are the vagaries of vocabulary.