The truth about tweezers

‘Tweezers’ are, as described by the Oxford British Vocabulary, ‘small pincers or nippers (originally as involved in the material of an etui) used for pulling out hair from the experience or for learning moment things.’ That interested term ‘etui’ is the key to ‘tweezers’. An ‘etui’ from the Old France ‘estuier’, to keep or keep safe) was a little situation that was often taken by people in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth hundreds of years containing individual equipment such as toothpicks, hooks and what we now contact ‘tweezers’. Eventually the name for the situation came to be used to one particular device itself, that useful set of pincers, which was known as a ‘tweeze’ and gradually ‘tweezers’. The action-word ‘to tweeze’, significance to use forceps on something, is actually what speakers contact a ‘back-formation’ from ‘tweezers’, and didn't appear until the Thirties.”  

Isn't etymology (the research of the record and growth of words) fun? Well, our buddy Ben certainly believes so. And now we know that, though they didn’t develop them, we have the fashion-forward France to thank for imposing the phrase “tweezers” (and its similarly turned sis, “scissors,” for that matter) on us. 

However strange the phrase itself, I’m certainly thankful to the historical Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Indians, and whoever else developed such a useful little device. One pull, no more splinter. It sure surpasses having to cut it out with a blade, the pre-tweezers technique of eliminating involved things. But now that I think about it, who’d have come up with a term like “splinter”?!

 Tweezers were in use in pre-Dynastic The red sea, as well as in Mesopotamia and Indian by 3000 B.C. The Romans also used them.So far, so excellent. But what about the phrase itself, which is fairly unusual when you come to think of it? Who would come up with a name like “tweezers” for a little, accurate learning implement?