Margaret Drabble

[D.M. Procida]

Margaret Drabble, I was intrigued and delighted to read, loves jigsaws ("the perfect employment") and has just published a kind of history of herself, of the jigsaw, and of her life through jigsaws.

How cool is that? I thought. I had an image of her carefully selecting the right tool in her garage before tackling a complex bit of woodwork, or looking at advertisements for them in a copy of some 1960s woodworking magazine.

Sadly, it turned out that both she and her reviewer meant jigsaw puzzles. Sad also that a writer, someone who is supposed to be attentive to words, can write a whole book blunderously calling jigsaw puzzles "jigsaws".

Daniele

[Rod]

I rather hope that MD herself gets to read that. :-)

[The Wanderer]

Bit like calling vacuum cleaners Hoovers.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember The Wanderer saying something like:

Only a bit - nobody really cleans their carpet with the Hoover Dam, for example, so the opportunity for confusion is slight. Edgar J. Hoover may have been a bit of a c*ck-sucker in his private life, but it certainly wasn't known about.

[Rob G]

The point presumably being that jigsaw puzzles were cut out with a jigsaw.

[Bob Martin]

More likely a scroll saw.

[The Natural Philosopher]

More likely a sodding great pastry cutter and a 30 ton press.