Why Do We Say Hammer
The first real tool I ever bought was a Stiletto framing hammer. It retains a prized place in my heart and nail bags. Maybe, though, I was just harkening back to the deepest, most ancestral roots we have as humans, and that is our extraordinary love of hitting things with hard objects. The hammer specifically is the oldest tool in existence, dating back 3.3 million years (which is longer than modern humans have even been around, meaning other human species also used hammers). The concept is pretty simple and yet totally effective: blunt force with a blunt object to percuss another object.
The English word hammer is from the Old Norse word, hamarr. Hamarr means “tool with a stone head”, so it once again reminds us that we are historically subject to our most basic instincts to pick up stones and use them to pound things. Even if English didn’t specifically pick up the word from Old Norse, we could have also brought it in from Old Saxon hamur, Dutch hamer, Old High German hamar, or German Hammer. Take your pick.
The most famous hammer, of course, is Thor’s hammer, Mjølnir. On a side note, mjøl, which means crushed or ground wheat (and is the origin of the word “mill” or “miller”) may also be connected to the Latin word malleus, which is the root of the word mallet.
So that’s why we say “hammer”.
A fun language lesson that should be easy enough:
That’s crazy.
