You don’t have the definition of hangnail nailed.
730
Bill Brohaugh
Years ago I suffered a plantar wart (and not a planter’s wart—see page 9) in the sole of my foot. This “wart,” actually a viral infection imbedded in my tender tootsie skin, hurt like hell. Hurt like a nail driven up through the bottom of my foot. This is not an imagined comparison, given that when I was in the first grade, I stepped on a spike lingering below the surface of a “muddy” barnyard, the spike driving itself up through my foot between bone and cartilage and tenting the skin on the top of my foot by an inch. This led to hospitalization, big bandages, and lots of cool coloring-book presents from my aunts and uncles. So, yes, hurt like a nail driven through my foot. Hurt like a hangnail.
A hangnail?
The nail-powerful pain of that owie irritating one of your fingers, that little bit of tender flesh that somehow got torn away from the area around your fingernail? How do we compare that quickly healed annoyance to a spike being driven up through your foot, leading to great coloring books?
I grant you, I’ve never gotten any cool toys for having a hangnail in the word’s modern sense, as I apparently secured all possible loot from experiencing the physical version of the word’s original sense.
The nail in hangnail meant—figuratively—the iron type (the kind I stepped on). An angncegl was, in Old English, compressed flesh within flesh, figuratively a nail in flesh (a com, for instance, or, yes, a plantar wart). Likely over the centuries, one syllable changed in meaning by folk etymology from iron nail to fingernail or toenail, while the other changed in both spelling and meaning from ang- to ag- to hang-, bringing us to the present meaning of flesh that hangs near the nail, as opposed to nail that pierces the flesh.
And here I am today, still involved in coloring books—but this time I’m writing them. Pass me the burnt umber crayon; I have another entry to write.