As promised last week, here’s my growing glossary of masonry terms. Learning new words while laying bricks makes hard labor interesting.
Mortar Board (noun)
I have a BA, MA, MPhil and a PhD, so until I laid my first brick, I thought a mortarboard was a square, academic hat graduates wore at commencement ceremonies. But when the word mortarboard officially entered the language in 1761, it referred to the wooden board used to hold mortar while it’s being applied. I’m pretty sure the word was in use long before the English Dictionary was published. Masonry—the craft of building with brick and stone—has been around since the Pyramids were built. It’s estimated that the Great Pyramid at Giza required 500,000 tons of mortar. Our oven doesn’t require so much; it just feels that way at the end of the day.
TO PARGE (verb)
“To parge,” means to lay on a thin, base layer of mortar on a damp brick so the thicker layer will stick, much the same way I apply a thin “crumb coat” of icing to a layer cake before I frost it.
COURSE and STOREY POLE (nouns)
A horizontal row of bricks is a “course.” To keep a course level and the three-eighths of an inch of mortar between each course even, we use a guidepost, also known as a gauging rod, storey rod or storey pole. Storey is spelled with an “e,” as in “storey,” the height between ceiling and floor, though it could just as well be “story” as in a narrative about where the bricks go.
THE PARTS OF THE BRICK (all nouns)
While a brick looks like a simple block, each part has a name. The top and bottom of a brick are called BEDS; the narrow ends are HEADERS. The long sides are STRETCHERS, and an edge is called an ARRIS. We’re using frogged bricks. A FROG is an indentation on one or both of the stretcher sides.
ROWLOCK PATTERN
We laid brick around what will be the base of the oven in a ROWLOCK, where the brick is laid on its long, narrow side. When the oven is complete, only the short end of these bricks will be exposed. If you want to learn more words like this, you can find an entire glossary of essential terms at the Mason Contractors Association of America’s website.
WORDS MATTER
Even though we’re amateur brick-layers, we’re already finding it useful to use these masonry-specific words to communicate clearly as we work together. While I’m unlikely to use this skill again in my lifetime, I will hold on to the words as I’m learning the craft of masonry, brick by brick.
Look for a new update on The Project: Building an Outdoor Bake Oven next week.
I get a kick out of learning new and specific vocabularies. They also come in handy for playing scrabble.