sticking

Pluralstickings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of stick.

   The door was sticking in its frame after the heavy rain.

   Sticking to a plan takes real discipline.

   Note

   The -ing form does two jobs. After be it builds the progressive (the door was sticking), and on its own it names the action as a noun (sticking to a plan takes discipline). It can carry any meaning of stick: adhering, jamming in place, hitting with a stick, or the craft senses of cutting a joint or setting type in a composing stick.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A planned sequence of left- and right-hand strokes a drummer uses to play a passage with drumsticks.

   The instructor marked a new sticking over the tricky sixteenth-note run.

   Drummers often experiment with different stickings to find the most efficient motion.

   Note

   A percussion teacher's word, and a countable one: a passage has its stickings, and students are told to observe them. Gary Cook's Teaching percussion (1997) points out a paradox. Beginners find the marked stickings harder to follow on plain quarter and eighth notes than they would if they simply alternated hands freely. Expect it in the plural and with verbs like observe, mark or try.

3. 3
   nounhistoricaluncountableplural

   Coarse, bruised, or damaged meat formerly sold to sausage and pie makers.

   The sausage maker bought sticking at the market each week to keep his costs down.

   six ounces of clods and stickings boiled

   1823, Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers: 1780-1849

   Note

   A word from the old meat trade that nearly always appears in the plural: stickings, not sticking. The House of Commons Parliamentary Papers of 1823 record "six ounces of clods and stickings boiled," a portion weighed out by the ounce and paired with clods. Today the word belongs in historical writing about food and diet, not at a modern butcher's counter.

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