Chrysti The Wordsmith: Stove Up

For k g l t f m in Bozeman Montana this is Christie the wordsmith. My hardworking dad occasionally complained of a keenness after a long day at work hours spent in the tractor seat working on heavy equipment or wielding a shovel. Left him sore and gimpy a condition he called being stove up. The expression is common in rural America where people work hard all day and go home with aching limbs. The stove in stove up is not the baking kind. This stove is etymological air to an older English words stave S T A V E which beginning in the 11 hundreds referred variously to a rod a pole a bar or simply a stick of wood. Later came the verb form to stave meaning to strike or jab with a stick or a bar. It's where our expression to stave someone off originated. By at least the early 1900s the word stove emerged as the past participle of stave as in the ship's hull was stove in by rocks as it

ran aground. A stove and ship barrel cask building or human rib cage is seriously damaged and difficult to repair and by extension a stove up human might feel as bruised as if he'd been beaten with a stay in one thousand sixty. Harper Lee wrote in her novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Mr. Avery I'll be in bed for a week. He's right stove up. I'm Christie the wordsmith. Could a verbal force. CHRISTIE The wordsmith a sponsored by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Zoot enterprises a high tech firm in Bozeman Montana offering challenging careers and innovative solutions for the financial services industry sued web dotcom.