Grand Cleaning

[John Delacour]

At 18:16 -0400 31/3/08, Farrell wrote:

>Um, not to seem overly critical or picky, but the plate is that hard 
>heavy metal thingee that the strings are tied to. It's the big gold 
>thing you see when you open the lid of the piano. I think that big 
>flat wooden thingee under the strings and under the big heavy metal 
>thingeeÊis called a soundboard or sumptin'.

And not to be over-critical of American usage, that hard metal thing 
is called in England the iron frame or metal frame, and Theodore 
Steinway refers to it as the metal frame.  A plate by definition is 
flat or sometimes domed and is a totally inapt term to use for the 
metal frame.  The "soundboard" of violins etc. is correctly referred 
to as the "plate".  That part of the metal frame where the hitchpins 
are is also a plate, the hitch plate, which existed before metal 
frames existed and which was eventually cast in to the metal frame. 
I don't know when Americans started calling the frame the plate, but 
it's certainly a misnomer.  As to capo tasto, capotasto, capo 
d'astro, capodastro and, lately on this list "capo tastro", the only 
literate one of this glorious collection is the first and a capo 
tasto has no place in a piano.  The fact that Steinway cast one or 
other of these illiterate misnomers into his old metal frames, which 
were presumably not yet misnamed plates, does not give it any 
validity.

JD


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