Talk:crowbar

Selective photo choice
I notice that to illustrate the article you use a photo of a crowbar that looks less like a crowbar than any other photo you might possibly have used.

https://www.google.com/search?q=crowbar&tbm=isch

and I wonder why you did that. I'd say you are tying to avoid disclosing evidence that, like a "hawk" (a plaster's tool which looks like a hawk when it and the hawk are in a certain posture that is frequent to both), a crowbar is named after the bird whose entire body the entire tool resembles.

Its curve (if it is in the classical crowbar shape that you chose not to employ for illustration) is the upper line of the outline of a crow as it sits on a horizontal support such as fence-top or clothes-line). The curve of the head is exactly right, as is the beak if you're not in front of it (too flat) and the lower termination in tail-feathers where the nail-prying end spreads out. The idea that the nail-prying ends look like the feet of crows is not MORE true for crows than for the feet of many other birds (excluding ducks and such), so, it's hooey. Some mammal's cloven hooves look more like the nail-prying ends of crowbars than do crows' feet. Construction-tools are named after birds whose posture they adopt. "Crane" is another example.

Since English people vary in their take on "h"s and "r"s, (some omitting them, others compensatingly inserting them where they aren't ("istory-book" for "history-book", "harful" for "awful", "gahden" for "garden", and "Mamar riz" for "Mama is", depending on region, era, and social stratum) the words "handsaw", "hamsaw", "ernshaw", "heronsew", and "anser" can all sound the same from some speakers. These are all words for herons (or their juveniles) according to scholars of now-extinct medieval dialects of England's regions, and "anser" survives in taxonomic words for geese and in "merganser" which is "merg-anser" i.e. an apt name for a duck known for diving. Shakespeare is whimsically what-iffing the notion that, like a demolitioner's crowbar (which is often called merely a "crow") and a plasterer's hawk, a "handsaw" is another construction-tool named after a bird whose entire body the entire tool resembles.2604:2000:C682:B600:F10B:5E78:2D3F:5892 07:05, 17 September 2016 (UTC)Christopher L. Simpson
 * We can't use just any image, it has to be in Commons (here is what there is to choose from). Chuck Entz (talk) 07:48, 17 September 2016 (UTC)