the.com/tinker
someone fixing things by feel, half genius, half guesswork, fully refusing to read the manual
means To tinker is to fiddle with, adjust, or attempt to repair something in a casual, experimental, often haphazard way; as a noun, it once meant a traveling mender of pots and pans.
from From Middle English tinkere, a name for the itinerant menders who roamed from village to village patching kettles and pans. The leading guess is that it's echoic — the tink-tink of a small hammer tapping metal — though some link it to 'tin,' the very stuff such craftsmen worked. The wandering, mend-anything reputation of these tinkers gave us the verb: to poke and prod at a thing hopefully until it works.
- old trade
- Traveling menders who repaired pots and pans
- slur roots
- Once a derogatory term for Irish Travellers
- toy connection
- Tinkertoy construction sets named for the trade
- tinker's damn
- A phrase meaning utterly worthless
- verb life
- To tinker means fiddling without a plan
tinker bell — peter pan's fairy character, created by j.m. barrie in 1904
tinkers' caravans — irish traveller caravans used from the 1950s-1970s for mobile metalworking