Talk:ax to grind

• I noticed that have an axe to grind is defined this as UK, idiomatic, when it is common in US English as well. The axe to grind points to ax to grind, where it's definitions are preceeded by US. Also have an ax to grind points to have an axe to grind. This means that the verb form is referred to one spelling of 'axe' and the noun form is referred to the other.

• Is there any reason why the UK or US qualifiers should not be dropped and these pages coordinated so they point to a single unified definition? --Jacecar (talk) 09:20, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

  I guess it's the axe/ax thing, in the UK I believe it is called an axe and not an ax. Mglovesfun (talk) 09:27, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Problems with Etymology 1

Etymology 1 reads:

From a story by Benjamin Franklin in which, a stranger who wanted to sharpen his ax on Franklin's father's grindstone. He was flattered by the stranger into turning the grindstone. After he sharpened the ax, the stranger realised that he was playing truant.

Problems:

1. Ambiguous use of "he": There are two male characters in the example, making the final two occurrences of "he" impossible to parse/bind.
2. Ungrammatical: "in which" should be followed by a complete sentence, whereas "a stranger who …" is simply a noun phrase.
3. Citation needed. Can't fix the above problems without seeing the original.

An unsourced mess. I've just removed it. Equinox ◑ 03:15, 22 November 2018 (UTC)

should include a discussion of the origin

Citations could be gathered; some clues here: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/158346/origin-of-to-have-an-axe-to-grind

I remember something about that from school, but the point of the phrase seemed a bit confusing at the time, because the story isn't quite what you expect: it tells that a man uses flattery to exploit a boy into doing the work of sharpening the ax for him, without telling what he needs to sharpen it for. I don't remember for sure to whom it was attributed when I was in school, but it seems there are 3 common attributions. I also read Franklin's autobiography in high school, so I guess I must have read that version of the story too, but that was not my first time encountering it.

So I'm surprised not to even find any hints about any of that, here.

The point of the story is written in the story itself. In the story it never mattered why the ax was being sharpened, it only mattered that the owner of the ax got it sharpened for free by using a particular trick: he constantly encouraged his "target" to focus his attention inwards on himself, by saying things calculated to activate the target's sense of vanity or pride. All the examples printed at the end of the story follow that same theme - one villain, a merchant, encourages his customers to taste many kinds of brandy, thus flattering them about their own refined palates, in order to get them to buy the expensive stuff; another tells a girl she's very attractive because he wants to get her into bed; the next one, a political figure of some kind, makes speeches about liberty to activate people's egotistical pride, while his real policies all go against liberty; and so on. Having an ax to grind means you want others to do something that will benefit you, something that they would normally refuse to do, and furthermore that you plan to get them to do it by inflating their egos in such a way that they will be not only willing but positively eager to do it - because you have slyly put them in a position where they must do it in order to continue feeling good about themselves. The meaning has also become more general over time, so that now it often just means you have a hidden agenda. But it's clear from the amount of repetition in the examples at the end of the story that the highly-specific version that included priming the target's ego to make them *want* to fulfill your hidden agenda was the original meaning. TooManyFingers (talk) 03:13, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

I reverted your edit because you were trying to make a phrase used by millions of people in a million different ways fit your single, simple idea. It's ironic that you removed Etymology 2 "because it was based only on speculation" at the same time you were changing Etymology 1 to fit your own speculation. If you're going to be making a major change to a common expression like this, you need to discuss it first at the Tea room and see if there's a consensus for your idea.

There was also the issue of whether the the existing translations matched the new definition. Chuck Entz (talk) 05:52, 13 July 2021 (UTC)