After spending a little time with the O.E.D. -- which
involved looking through three separate lenses at once --
I discovered that a "mangle" has always been a contrivance
for flattening linen -- at first a box filled with rocks,
then various improvements that ended in two cylinders
pressing firmly together.
The earlier mangles moved back and forth, leading to
"mangle" as a name for a gadget that converts rotary motion
into back-and-forth motion, and a figure of speech in which
someone running back and forth senselessly was compared to a
mangle. (I suspect that the quote quoted was almost the
only time this figure was used! But it does indicate that
the author expected the reader to have seen a reciprocating
mangle in operation.)
The rubber mangle attached to washing machines isn't
mentioned; I never heard it called anything but "wringer"
until this thread. And the heated mangle was called an
"ironer" -- I had no contact with those, as they were
expensive and something easily done without (people were
*poor* until the roaring seventies; I'm still a little
aghast that Dave and I think that we need a motor vehicle
each even though we are both retired.)
I had heard "mangle" applied to the rotary ironer -- come to
think of it, that is a separate device. The ironer had one
padded roller that pressed against a curved, heated plate; a
mangle has two cylinders.
Seems strange that the word should hang on in Britain, but
be so unfamiliar here. Perhaps it's a city-country
difference, rather than a transpondian difference: the
history of the word mentioned that a woman who owned a
mangle would rent it out to her neighbors, which implies
that it would be too expensive for a farm wife to buy just
for personal use.
There are two theories for mangle as in damage, neither
related at all to the laundry machine. One theory is that
it a frequentive of "maim" -- which leads me, now and again,
to tack "gle" onto various verbs to see whether any of them
sound natural. I didn't come up with any, 'cept maybe
"snag" -> "snaggle". "Ting" -> "tingle"? "tink" -> tinkle?
The other theory is that "mangle" once meant "melee". Which
suggests a relation to "mingle", but if so, the O.E.D.
didn't mention it.
--
Joy Beeson
http://joybeeson.home.comcast.net/
http://roughsewing.home.comcast.net/
http://n3f.home.comcast.net/ -- Writers' Exchange
http://www.timeswrsw.com/craig/cam/ (local weather)
west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A.
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