Dutchman, a Perfect Patch on an Imperfection

Welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. This is Stephen from East Aurora, New York.

Hey, Stephen.

So I was inquiring about the word Dutchman. I’m a furniture maker, and I’ve come across it when I was working in New England and worked for a relatively high-end maker making bespoke furniture. And essentially what it is is a patch. So my understanding of a Dutchman is that it’s a patch of a much higher level than just sort of a spackle it over kind of thing.

Where it would come about would be, we would be shaping the edging on a table, and you would do your best to select very clear stock. But inevitably, as you profiled down into something, you’d find like a little what’s called a cat’s paw or a little mineral streak or something like that, which didn’t look good. So you had to make a little Dutchman. You would square out the joint and then let in a piece of salad stock that was much cleaner or didn’t have a defect in it. And that was called a Dutchman.

And my, you know, limited Googling on it has sort of led me to that it was, it’s work of a lesser quality. And that’s not what I understand it to me, but I guess I sort of wondered from whence, you know, comes the etymology or the origin of it. You know, why a Dutchman?

Oh, wow. Yeah, thank you for the backstory on how you use that, because that word really has gone through some changes since it first pops up in English at least 150 years ago. So you use Dutchman in woodworking. It’s not really a mistake, is it? You’re patching an imperfection perfectly so that people can’t tell.

Right. I mean, you match the grain and the color and everything else. I mean, certainly it has been used. When you bought your job or nick an edge or something like that, it’s like, okay, then it is also with Dutchman, obviously. There’s a lot more to say on this because folklorists and researchers have looked into this.

As a matter of fact, Archie Green was one researcher who wrote about this in the 1960s in the Journal of American Speech. And he talked to woodworkers all over the country at the time about this. And the overall point that he makes about Dutchman is that it’s one of a very large set of slangy terms used in blue-collar physical labor professions that refer to ethnic or national origin. And they can be negative or positive or neutral. But they all reflect this integration of immigrants into the workplace and the friction that that can generate.

And so sometimes it comes out as humor or sometimes dark humor, bittersweet humor, but it comes out in these little terms like Dutchman. And so there are all these terms and sometimes they’re outside the workplace. So they represent these nations and ethnicities on the world stage and they show up in these little ways.

In this case, Archie Green thinks it has to do with the huge number of German immigrants who came to the U.S. during the 1800s, many of them bringing this prized woodworking skill. And as you may know, the German Deutsch, Deutsch means German in German, was often termed as Dutch in English. And so people, it’s possible the Dutchman just refers to this very careful way of fixing or replacing an imperfection and a bit of wood in the very skilled way that a German would do it. You know, if they were the workers of the highest caliber, that’s what they brought to it.

That’s his theory. It’s about solving your problems and finding a good outcome, even in the face of a less than ideal situation. A Dutchman is about solving a problem. And what’s interesting is the older uses of Dutchman were about just even fillers or space holders, not necessarily a perfect one and not necessarily to fix a mistake. It might just be the woods a little uneven, so you have to plane it some. And that could be a Dutchman or you smooth out a hollow.

And it was used in typesetting, masonry, metalwork, shipbuilding, theater. In order to make two sets match, they would use a Dutchman of canvas or cloth. All of these different fields used the term Dutchman in a lot of different ways. In typesetting, they would take toothpicks and wedge the lead type to get it exactly where they wanted, and that was a Dutchman. Interesting to see what trait was sort of the birth of it, but I suppose we’ll never know.

Well, I do believe that it was from shipbuilding. That’s the earliest uses that we find.

Okay, okay. Well, Steve, thanks so much for sharing some of your own work with us. It sounds like a fascinating thing you do.

Well, thank you so much.

All right. Take care.

All right. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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