deckle n. a thick band of fat on (a cut of) meat; a very fatty cut of meat. Etymological Note: Mostly likely connected to German dicht ‘thick,’ dick ‘thick’ or ‘fat,’ or Dicke ‘fat person, a fatty.’ The prefix dick- is used to to indicate “fatty,” “big,” “fattening,”or “thick” (as in “thick-bodied” and “thick in the head”) in various German compounds. The -el ending is a dimunitive, making deckle mean, more or less, “a little fatty thing.” Less likely, deckle is perhaps from another German deckel, “a little covering,” which came into English as deckle, a device that controls the size of pages in paper-making, producing deckle-edged paper that is rough and un-cut. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Why do we write the sound of a dog barking as bow wow? Isn’t that noise more like woof, woof or arf, arf or ruff ruff? Surprisingly, the oldest of these is bow wow, or as William Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest (Bookshop|Amazon), bowgh wawgh...
Vogelheu—literally, “Vogelheu”—is a Swiss dish with toasted bread, cubed and cooked with eggs and other ingredients for a tasty meal that makes efficient use of leftover bread. This is part of a complete episode.
Related
A printing catalogue I am currently translating into Castilian (Spain’s Spanish) includes “deckle” as one out of several edge finishings of paper (among which: “pinking; colonial; scallop; shortwave; wave; squiggle; Victorian”).
I am about to render “irregular” (as in former times printed photographs’ edges would be finished, sometimes by genly hitting the egdes with a scissor’s blade).
Thanks for your dictionary.
Esteve Comes i Bergua
Translator and proofreader
(English, Italian and French into Catalan and Castilian)
ecb@terrassa.net
esteve_comes@yahoo.es