Bodkin and bolster

I used the word bodkin the other day, meaning a very large needle, and somehow the word bolster came into my mind, meaning a large pillow which goes right across the bed and is sometimes like a roll of fabric rather than a sac filled with feathers or down or some other stuffing. They are both quite old-fashioned words, I’m not sure my children would know what they are, or even if they did by definition, they may not have seen either. I don’t mean that my childhood was filled with bodkins and bolsters, but when I think that my grandparents were born in the 1880’s, the language they would have used, which I would have heard would be from a very distant age.

I think of a bodkin as being a needle, but there are other uses for the word: a needle used for making holes in fabric or leather, or a blunt needle for threading tape or ribbon through something, or a long hairpin with a big knobbly head, sometimes designed or something used in printing, like an awl or pick to take the letters from set type, and it can even mean a dagger or stiletto. This last use, as a weapon, I think I had forgotten but of course, hamlet mentions it in his famous ‘To be or not to be’, soliloquy:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?

The word may come from the Celtic… I had thought erroneously it meant a little ‘bod’ as words ending in ‘kin’ often mean a little something… but apparently not, it originally meant a dagger and has been used in other ways.

The noun bolster (as opposed to the verb meaning to support or prop up) is, as I mentioned, a long, usually cylindrical cushion or pillow, but can be anything which looks like it and is used as a support, even a horizontal piece of  timber on a post to shorten the unsupported span of a beam. The word, meaning what it does now, comes via a lot of other languages from Old Norse.