Wood glue and Metaphors

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am a teacher at base.  I’ve woven some interesting activities around this: woodworking, for example.

Before I started woodworking late last year, I never dreamed what a big part glue would play.

Sure, I knew the wood had to be held together somehow, but I thought nails or screws.  I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

For one thing, I’ve used precious few nails. In fact, if your definition of nail is too narrow, I haven’t used any.  I’ve used “pins.”  These pins aren’t exactly like the one’s used to hold pieces of cloth together.  

I bought myself a Ryobi pin nailer which shoots slender pieces of metal into wood (or you hand if you aren’t careful).  The metal of the pin (or brad) is about as thick as a thick staple.  

It turns out that for what I am doing, glue is foundational.

Now, as I said above, I have used pins.  I have also used more screws in the last six months than I had in the previous almost six decades of life.  However, the pins and the screws are pretty much there to keep the wood in place until the glue dries.

Here I would like to observe that I hadn’t worked much with glue since kindergarten or maybe first grade in art projects.  Now I find myself learning something that some use to earn a living.  Let us not poo-poo the commercial value of the arts, eh?

Another thing I have learned--first by hearing it in YouTube videos and then by seeing it with my own eyes--glue is stronger than wood. 

As I am a math teacher at base, and, as such, have the psychological need to make things overly precise, let me amplify that last point.  Wood consists of cellulose fibers that are held together by a natural substance called lignin.  Modern wood glue is stronger than lignin.  To see this, you can glue a couple of boards together properly and then break them apart.  When you do this, the wood will break before the glue does.

I’ve made myself a work table.  I made each leg by putting a pair of two-by-fours into an ell-shape; that is to say, the cross-section is an ell. I put my glue on the “two-inch” lateral side of one piece and laid it against the “four-inch” lateral side of the other.  Then I nailed them together with pins.  If it had been the pins alone, I would’ve been able to pull the pieces apart with my hands, but I clamped them and let them dry.  Now they are holding up a work table.

Wood-glue: It is great stuff.

I see my woodworking as being another creative outlet that runs parallel to my writing.  I have observed in this space before that I find them similar.  Each requires putting pieces together.  You work with each piece and you then put the pieces together.

My wife actually taught me that I needed to put pieces together.  She accomplished this in her own gentle way by saying, “I think you have a rough transition here.”  

So I needed something to hold it together.

There are lots of ways of doing this.  My favorite way is metaphor.  To my way of looking at things, metaphors are to writing as glue is to woodworking: they are stronger than the wood itself.

Often when we write, we do so to present what we perceive as a truth.  One way to do it is to use an extended metaphor which seems to be parallel to the truth we are trying to convey. Those who disagree with us can criticize our writing and tear it apart.

In cases such as this, often the metaphor will stand, but the rest of our writing will break.

For example, there might be some who would argue that writing is not like woodworking at all and give good, convincing reasons for it, thereby breaking this essay.  However, woodworking/wood glue are still good metaphors.

As with woodworking, there are some who are better at writing than others.  Some writers are better at using metaphors; some woodworkers are better at applying glue.

There is something to know.

When writers use metaphors, we are reaching out into the real world, the world of common shared experience.  We want something concrete that the reader can understand, so that they can use it as a guide to understanding what we are trying to actually tell them.

In a case like today, I thought I needed to do a little exposition on wood glue.  As I didn’t know anything about it before late last year, I thought many of my readers might not either.

This has the value that even if something breaks the essay, at least you’ve learned something.  And that’s what it’s all about for me in the end.

I am a teacher at base, after all.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )