Electric: Tools Names !link!

When electricity was harnessed, the tools were named after the person performing the labor, not the labor itself. A "drill" is derived from the Old English thirlian , meaning to pierce, but the modern electric "driller" (shortened to drill) implies a replacement of the human operator. The machine became the actor. The tool absorbed the verb. By naming the machine a "sander," we acknowledged that the machine had taken over the repetitive drudgery that once defined a specific human activity. The name serves as a memorial to the hand tool it replaced; the electric tool is the ghost of the carpenter’s labor, stripped of fatigue but retaining the motion.