Over the last few months I’ve been building a home in the garden for my 95-year-old dad. After much soul searching, I decided against using twigs and grass cuttings and am doing it properly, with wood and bricks and everything. He’s a lucky man.
One thing I’ve learned about construction is that it has a language all of its own. You know that Rowan Atkinson sketch, where he’s a teacher reading the register and the names are things like Nibble and Orifice and Undermanager? Well, I reckon he could rewrite the whole sketch with names taken entirely from construction. For example:
Aggregate
Batten
Corbel
Cowl
Downpipe
Eaves
Fascia
Footing
Gable
Jamb
Lintel
Membrane
Noggin
Oversite
Purlin
Screed
Soffit
Tosh
‘Jamb’ to be repeated while peering around the room with one eyebrow raised.
Being people of the world and no doubt familiar with the jargon of the building trade, you probably read this list thinking yep, yep, yep… heard all of th… hang on a minute… Tosh?
Well, that’s exactly what I thought. So there I was, thinking about the best way to fix my uprights to my wall plate, when Dave the builder turned up and said, “Just tosh it.”
“Just what it?” I enquired.
“Tosh it,” he replied.
The only time I’d heard that word before was when my Physics teacher was handing back my homework. Being a scientist, he would, in extreme circumstances, expand it to ‘toshite’, making it sound like some kind of rare mineral. Or maybe he was implying that, when it came to my homework, the ‘to’ was silent.
Anyway, Dave the builder is not the sort of person to talk tosh so I took him at his word and I toshed it. (‘Tosh’ nailing, it turns out, is where you join two pieces of timber by driving nails in at an angle, rather than banging them straight through from the back. It’s handy for when you can’t get to the back because you’ve already put your insulation in.)
So now we’re on to the roof, which has possibly the richest lexicon of all the aspects of the building. Eaves, gables, fascias, bargeboards, soffits… words you never come across in everyday life, but words you have to learn if you want to have a meaningful conversation with a roofer. Soffit is the one Mick the Roofer uses most. He seems to shout it every time he drops a nail.
