Dear Mr. Google...

Day 98: "Dear Mr. Google," I would like to write, "When I enter a search parameter, your first assumption should be that I know what I'm talking about. It should NOT be that I have made a typographical error." I'm sure you can imagine what came up when I was trying to find different styles of pirn, a pirn being a device found in spinning mills onto which a cop of yarn is wound. I suppose the search results could have been worse had I included the words "cop" and "wound," but they were bad enough with just "pirn." These, my dear Mr. Google, are pirns, and they have absolutely nothing in common with the material you suggested, except for three letters of the alphabet.

Pirns came up in discussion yesterday when a friend sent me a documentary video about one of the oldest operating spinning mills in the United States, and I promised her a photo. Of course, most of our yarns and threads now come from overseas and are spun in mills using very different machines and techniques. Pirns are still used to hold the cops in many cases, but wooden ones are something of a rarity in modernized mills. I would show you an example of a modern pirn, but I don't want to chance another Google search. One time down that road was enough.