Fake 174

This from a box of fancy chocolates from Kingston, on which more in due course.

In the meantime, the faking lies in the bow used to decorate the box. Now the idea of a bow is that when you pull the loose ends it comes undone: a knot which is not a knot, as it were. Unlike the trefoil of reference 2 which is a real knot - pull its loose ends and you tighten it up.

However, for greater security, this bow has been stitched together, and a piece of elastic has been inserted in the ribbon around the back so that you can get the ribbon off the box that way. And to add insult to injury, when I removed the stitching, what looked like a bow turned out to be a doubled up overhand knot - the knot theoretic equivalent of the trefoil - and not attached to the ribbon proper at all. An add-on. Or perhaps I should say sew-on.

Packaging of even the best chocolates not what it used to be.

I might say that the scissors I used, rather good scissors with what looked like good sharp points, were not much good for removing stitches. Not nearly sharp enough. What I needed was one of the gadgets turned up by Bing and included above - but which it calls a 'seam ripper' - a name I do not recognise at all. Gemini does seam rippers too, even when prompted with 'quick-unpick' or 'quik'npik', offered by BH. He suggests, quite reasonably, that this was a name for some particular, long lost brand of seam ripper. He is quite firm that this last is the proper name.

In any event, whatever they are called, ours seems to have gone missing.

PS: a closing curiosity being the need to treat 'scissors' as a plural. I wonder if other languages do this? A matter which OED does not resolve, although I do learn that the word in related to 'chisel' and that scissors are a pair of cutters, joined in the middle so as to work in unison. Also that 'scissor' was an old word for a tailor. But, seemingly, quite unrelated to schism, despite the related meanings.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/01/fake-173.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/02/deep-dive.html.

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