fillets

[eub]

[Poll #274389]

Comments

[bn29.livejournal.com]

The inverse? reverse? of homophones are weird.
I spell both fillet, but 'fill it' makes me think of I-beams and welding.

[ralphmelton.livejournal.com]

The definition of 'fillet' with which I'm familiar is a sort of headband. Tell me mre about the model-rocket thing, please.

[brokengoose.livejournal.com]

I thought of welding. I looked it up -- it's a reinforcing weld to hold two perpendicular pieces of metal together. Is that how it's used in model rocketry?

I thought of welding because my grandfather was learning to weld when I was in junior high school. I remember him complaining about it. I didn't know quite what he was complaining about at the time.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

A fillet is a head adornment, flat and wide. I seem to recall hearing of this welding term before, though.

[hattifattener]

Yup. It must have been in the Estes instruction manual or something for Eli and me to remember it like this. You're supposed to have a fillet of glue on each side of where the fin attaches to the body, to make sure the joint is strong.

It's the same meaning as your welding usage, I'm pretty sure, and I've seen it used this way in plenty of other contexts (say, carpentry). But model rocket fins are what come to mind first.

[thatmathchick.livejournal.com]

The pronunciation "fill it" makes me think of my English relatives, who say wacky things like that.

Re: fillets

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

i've never built model rockets (why not i can't rightly say), but i am well familiar with fillet from building all sorts of other things.

not heard the headband meaning before. huh. cool, new word (of sorts).

i use "filet" for the boneless fish or meat, since that's the french for it, which i came across first. i always thought people who spelled that "fillet" were wrong, but my dictionary thinks otherwise, though the original seems to survive in french cuisine terms such as "filet mignon".

[eub.livejournal.com]

As hattifattener says, it must have been in the Estes manuals. It seems to date from 1935 as an aeronautical term, "a fairing at the junction of two surfaces to improve the air-flow". This seems derived from the use, to 1779, in carpentry: "A narrow strip of wood fastened upon any surface to serve as a support, etc. or to strengthen an angle formed by two surfaces."

The perfect fillet should have a radius of 4 to 8 percent of the fin root chord.

[eub.livejournal.com]

You have the original meaning in English, by about a century.

a head-band or hair-ribbon
a strip of material
a bandage
an obstetrical head-loop
a perforated curb to confine the curds in making cheese
a thread (of life)
a root-fiber, leaf-vein, pistil, or stamen
the encyliglotte
a band of flesh
a lobe of the liver
(pl.) the loins
a cut of meat from neat the loins or ribs
the middle part of a leg of veal, tied with a string
various bands in architecture, heraldry, zoology
("In a spider: The space between the eyes and the base of the mandibles or chelicerae")
a strip of wood fastened inside an angle
a line impressed on a book-cover
a fairing in an angle to reduce drag

(is ultimately from the Latin filum, thread.)

Re: fillets

[eub.livejournal.com]

There are two related cookery terms, one a strip of meat, and the other a roast tied with a string for cooking, and I was hoping one could be assigned to "filet" and the other to "fillet", but it does not seem so. It looks like the word came in (14cen) from the French filet (having already been specialized away from its root sense of "thread"), and gradually (to 17cen) had its "l" doubled for Englishness. "Filet mignon" the OED dates no earlier than 1906!

[eub.livejournal.com]

Homographs, I guess?

[eub.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, and what made me wonder about all this was that the OED doesn't know about the two pronunciations of "fillet" and their distinct meanings. But yinz do, so good.

fuh-loy

[brokengoose.livejournal.com]

http://www.m-w.com makes a distinction between the two (and includes multiple pronunciations for fillet!). According to Merriam-Webster, filet is derived from the french word for net, so you could probably argue that it's the proper word for roast-tied-with-a-string. That starts to get close to the whole proscriptivist vs. descriptivist linguistics debate, though.

Re: fuh-loy

[eub.livejournal.com]

According to Merriam-Webster, filet is derived from the french word for net, so you could probably argue that it's the proper word for roast-tied-with-a-string.

It would be tidy, but OED reports that "fillet" has earlier usage for that (and makes etymological sense there, too), so I think we have to let it all be a glorious haggis.