2806: Pen Knife Aug 26, 2024

The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the knife is mightier than the quill.

The term "pen knife" originally referred to a small, thin knife used for sharpening and indeed crafting quills, which is made of the end of large feathers, typically from a goose. With modern tools, it is easier to use separate knives to 1) clean the outside 2) clear the interior 3) form the nib and 4) cut a slit in the nib from these feathers, but when materials were more precious and it wasn’t practical to sharpen them all individually, having one jack-of-all-trades knife was just easier. 

Now, a pen knife is not only a small, handy knife, but also one that folds, sometimes giving the rough appearance of a pen, but this is not why it was named, and in fact ‘pen’ is from the Latin ‘penna’ meaning—and related to— ‘feather’. This is true in many other languages, like the French ‘plume’, related to ‘plumage’ in English, and of course shows up in “nome de plume” Over time, as quills became obsolete and the need for such knives diminished, "pen knife" came to describe any small folding knife, even though its connection to pen-making has faded from common knowledge.