Is "Choking up on a blade" a new thing?

calm

calm

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I only noticed this description in the past couple of years, to describe getting a good grip on the bade of a knife, utilising some unsharpened part of the blade and wonder if it is a new term/desire/technique or whether it has been around for years?
 
Oh my.

Well, since this is the internet, let's add a word to the descriptor, for all the reasons.

"Choking up on a blade". Which is entirely different.

I suppose it's because somebody thought it looked like you were going to remind the knife that it owed you money?

Some knives have a "choil" (don't ask me to pronounce it), or a "ricasso". These un-sharpened parts of the blade allow you to wrap your finger around the hilt or flipper tab or what have you, making the knife a sub-hilt without some of the disadvantages of having a purpose-designed sub-hilt.

Not a new way to describe it as far as I know. My guess is that the internet has allowed the proliferation of descriptive phrases, and this was the one that most people adopted.
 
Decades-old baseball term used to describe a batter holding the bat higher up on the grip area.

The term easily transposed into the knife world. I can remember hearing "choking up" on a knife 40 years ago. I have to assume it was used even longer ago than that.
 
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Shorttime said:
Oh my.

Well, since this is the internet, let's add a word to the descriptor, for all the reasons.

"Choking up on a blade". Which is entirely different.

I suppose it's because somebody thought it looked like you were going to remind the knife that it owed you money?

Some knives have a "choil" (don't ask me to pronounce it), or a "ricasso". These un-sharpened parts of the blade allow you to wrap your finger around the hilt or flipper tab or what have you, making the knife a sub-hilt without some of the disadvantages of having a purpose-designed sub-hilt.

Not a new way to describe it as far as I know. My guess is that the internet has allowed the proliferation of descriptive phrases, and this was the one that most people adopted.
Click to expand...
corrected, I missed the up
 
I don't think it's new.
Kershaw 1030 introduced in 1974.
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Choils have been popular since I got seriously into knives and studying them in like 2007. But yea "choking up on it" is just a term I've heard all my life for "gettin in there" with your tool for more precise work.
 
It is just a mean to get your hand above the work rather than to the side, like a kitchen hand grabbing a chef knife by the top of the blade for mincing stuff.
Some knive patterns are made for that by design; think of the Ulu for example, some of which have been unearthed and dated to be around 4500 years old or thereabout, so no, not a new concept.
 
This being 2023, it needs a catchy name. Something for the youtube crowd.

Like- "choil clutch"

Random youtube knife personality- "Now for maximum control during use you're gonna want to choil clutch your knife."

(I'm joking of course 😁)
 
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calm said:
I only noticed this description in the past couple of years, to describe getting a good grip on the bade of a knife, utilising some unsharpened part of the blade and wonder if it is a new term/desire/technique or whether it has been around for years?
Click to expand...
Same technique my father taught me to use with slip joint knives in order to safely work with the point about 65 years ago. It wasn't new then.
 
^^ Agreed. Looking archeological finds of early cutting tools it seems likely that the technique has been around as long as the blade itself. In fact, when you consider that these tools predated the handle, you could argue that it was the more original way
 
Knives&Lint said:
^^ Agreed. Looking archeological finds of early cutting tools it seems likely that the technique has been around as long as the blade itself. In fact, when you consider that these tools predated the handle, you could argue that it was the more original way
Click to expand...
That seems true, good point. Back when people were using shards of obsidian and the like, they didnt even have handles from what we know.
 
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