Horological confusion

Woke up this morning to the sound of the central heating clicking in, very audible as bleeding the radiators was a touch overdue. A central heating which clicks in at 0630 at this time of year, so I assumed that that was the time, only sometime later noticing that the kitchen clock was an hour slow. It turning out, that for the first time in living memory, we had failed to register that it was clock changing time the evening before. And furthermore, Cortana, despite her bossiness in other matters, had not seen fit to remind us. Not even, checking this morning, to the point of putting a note in the calendar, in the way that Filofax used to.

But not such a big deal as it used to be, as it is only the three or four clocks and watches which need attending too. Everything else looks after itself. The exception being the car which, despite having what must be extensive on-board computation, does not manage summer time. A former pain, as it took me a long time to learn how to change its clock. Perhaps if we had not got a bottom of the range Ford things would have been different.

Went on, prompted once again by Maigret, to the mysteries of the word 'fraise', a word which is hopelessly muddled up in my mind with 'framboise'. I suppose the similar meanings, word starts ('fr') and word ends ('ise') are too much for it.

Knock off the terminal 'e' and you get both the word for cold and the word for expenses. No sign yet of what connects these two rather different meanings,

And then the French, associating in a rather imaginative way from the shape and surface texture of a strawberry, get the white lacy collars favoured by both men and women in the 17th century (but do not stray into thinking that it is the same as our 'frieze', which comes from somewhere else altogether). A countersinking bit for a drill. A dentist's drill more generally. Milling machines and their cutting heads more generally. The intestinal caul of a lamb or a calf. Presumably something which they buy from butchers and so know about.

From where I branch off to caul in the OED and find all kinds of meanings, nothing to do with strawberries (or babies). Including, for example, spiders' webs, cabbages, cabbage stalks and sheep folds. A very versatile word indeed, or at least it has been.

PS: furthermore, I am pleased to have now arrived at, rather late in life, what might be a basic distinction between a milling machine and a lathe, both widely used to shape metal objects by rotary action. In a milling machine it is the cutting head which rotates, whereas in a lathe it is the piece to be shaped which rotates.