the.com/pick
the smallest tool with the biggest opinion about where things go
means To choose or select something from a group, or to pluck, pull at, or dig into something with a pointed tool or your fingers.
from A tangle of two old words braided together. The 'choose' sense and the 'poke/dig' sense both trace back to Old English picung and the verb pician, 'to prick' — kin to a whole European family of words for pointed things (think the French pic, the Italian picco). The tool we call a pick — that pointed digging implement — shares this stabby ancestry, and 'pickaxe' is itself a folk-reshaped form of the older 'pickax,' bent over time to sound like an axe it never quite was.
- guitar origin
- earliest plectrums were carved from tortoiseshell
- lock magic
- two thin picks defeat most pin tumbler locks
- climbing fang
- ice axe picks bite frozen walls to stop falls
- draft power
- a number one pick reshapes an entire franchise
- nose taboo
- the most universal habit nobody admits to
pick axe — mining tool with pointed and flat ends, used in geology and construction since ancient times
guitar pick — small plectrum used to pluck strings, standard on electric guitars since 1920s
ice pick — sharp mountaineering tool used to climb ice and arrest falls on glaciers