couching

Pluralcouchings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of couch.

   The minister was couching his refusal in carefully diplomatic language.

   Couching the complaint as a suggestion made it far easier to hear.

   Note

   One spelling does two grammatical jobs. As a participle it builds progressives (she was couching on the grass); as a gerund it is the verb acting as a noun (the couching of one's terms). It carries every use of couch, intransitive and transitive alike: lying down, stooping, bedding something in a layer, lowering a lance to attack. Once it takes a plural, couchings, it has become the noun for the act.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The action of laying material or an object flat onto a surface, or of lying down in place.

   The couching of the thatch required steady, overlapping layers along the roof.

   A gentle couching of the patient onto the stretcher avoided any further injury.

   Similarlaying, placement

   Note

   Papermakers keep this noun in everyday working use. For them couching is the step of transferring the wet sheet from the mold onto the felt, as Josep Asunción's The Complete Book of Papermaking (2003) describes it. The sheet is bedded down in a layer, which is the verb's older idea of laying something in a bed. The word itself goes back to Middle English couchynge, simply couch plus -ing.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   A method of embroidery in which threads or other materials are laid on the surface of the fabric and stitched down, rather than drawn through it.

   The medieval altar cloth featured elaborate couching in silver-wrapped thread.

   By using couching, the embroiderer kept the costly silk on the surface where it caught the light.

   Note

   An embroiderer's term with a practical logic behind it. Some threads are too thick or too fragile to pull through the ground fabric. So they are laid on top and anchored by small stitches worked across them in a finer thread. A thread worked this way is said to be couched. The method suits costly or delicate materials, such as metal-wrapped thread, that are meant to stay on the surface.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   An early, now largely abandoned, method of treating a cataract in which a sharp instrument displaces the clouded lens within the eye.

   Before modern surgery, couching offered the only relief for those blinded by cataracts.

   The surgeon performed couching with a slender needle, sliding the lens downward and out of view.

   Note

   Medicine's oldest use of the word, and its most startling: the needle did not take the clouded lens out. It pushed the lens back into the vitreous cavity and away from the pupil, leaving it inside the eye. Ruit, Tabin and Wykoff (2006) call couching the main technique of cataract surgery for most of more than twenty centuries. They trace its first written description to an Indian surgeon. Today the word belongs to the history of surgery.

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