The Merriam-Webster Word of the Day was “haywire.”
The noun haywire refers to a type of wire once used in baling hay and sometimes for makeshift repairs. This hurried and temporary use of haywire gave rise to the adjective (and sometimes adverb) haywire.
It was that phrase “once used” that I stuck like a burr. The memories of my youth are now officially quaint.
The bales we handled were generally 60 to 80 pounds. We stacked them to the rafters of a tin barn in the summer in Texas. The temperature at the door of the barn might be 100 degrees. Since heat rises, it got hotter the closer you got to the rafters. Every once in a while you’d have to wrestle (though in Texas we’d rassle) a 90-pounder. And, of course, the laws of nature decree that the only space left for it would be at the top of the stack, up in the rafters, over by the wasp nests.
Actually, some hay was baled with wire and some with twine. We saved both. You save everything on a farm.
When the strands of a barbed-wire fence would separate and break, the repairs were all haywire.
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