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December 15, 2003
Happy Fun Knowledge
I learned something this morning that I felt compelled to share. Remember the age-old packaging directive "do not fold, spindle or mutilate"? Well, fold is straightforward enough, as is mutilate, but I confess that I had no idea what it meant to "spindle" something. My best guess would have been rolling something up into a tube; such as you might do with a poster. It turns out that "spindle" refers to the pre-computer revolution practice of chronologically ordering documents by impaling them on a spike. Office workers would all have these "spindles" on their desks, and when they were finished with a document, they would add it to the pile stuck on the spindle. When the time came to archive old documents, or the spindle was full, a string was threaded through the hole and used to bind up the documents for archiving.
So now you know. Here on this blog, we're all about reader value.
Posted by Dan at December 15, 2003 09:06 AM
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