Thing To Be Today: on tenterhooks.

 By now we should know whether Vladimir Putin has decided whether it's in his best interests to invade Ukraine. This post is being written on February 15th 2022, and although it's plain that Mr Putin has gone to a lot of trouble and expense to array an invasion force, complete with hospital facilities, around the borders of his country, his government is still assuring everyone that it does not intend to invade.*

Some people seem to believe Mr Putin. The rest of the people of the world don't.

And so here we are, on tenterhooks, with many embassies in Kyiv now operating on a skeleton staff, and huge US bombers flying, coincidentally we are told, into British bases.

This is a tenter hook:

No, it's not actually a hook, but never mind. It's a thing that used to be attached to a tenter, which is a wooden frame used in former times in the process of making cloth.

Woollen cloth would be spun and woven unwashed, and then the cloth would be sent to a fuller (also known as a tucker or a walker) to be cleaned. He would fix the wet cloth to wooden tenters in tenter fields or tentergrounds so that the cloth didn't shrink as it dried.

People have been using the phrase to describe a state of figurative tension since the 1700s.

Thing To Be Today: on tenterhooks. The Old English form of the word hook was hōc. Tenter comes from the Latin word tendere, which means to stretch.

*It is now 21st February, but we're still no wiser. Personally, I can't see anyone getting any useful advantage out of any likely scenario. Can you?