Not a clue.
Dear Word Detective: I’ve heard the saying “can tell a hawk from a handsaw,” or sometimes “can’t tell…,” but I have no idea what the saying means. Can you help? — Allan Pratt.
Absolutely, no problemo. But first, two questions of my own. One, have you actually heard someone say that phrase aloud (as opposed to reading it somewhere)? Secondly, if the answer is “yes,” where in the world do you live? I’d give my eyeteeth to live among people who actually use phrases like that. I was searching on Google News just now to see if any publications had used the phrase lately, and while only a few had in the past couple of decades, back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries it seems that nearly everyone knew the phrase. By the way, assuming that at some point in the future someone is going to invent a working time machine, why can’t I buy one now?
Meanwhile, back at your question, “to know a hawk from a handsaw” means to be able to correctly perceive reality, to be able to tell things apart, to generally know what’s going on and, at a minimum, not to be nuts. It comes from Shakespeare’s 1604 play “Hamlet,” Act II, Scene 2. Hamlet, who has been acting more than a bit loopy, gets into a conversation with the courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, in the course of which he hints that his apparent madness may be a tactical pose he adopts at specific times, and not true dementia, saying “I am but mad North North west; when the wind is Southerly, I knowe a Hauke, from a hand saw.”
There is now apparently general agreement that the “hand saw” in that line was originally “heronshaw,” a dialectical English form of “heron,” meaning that Hamlet was contrasting two types of birds, rather than a bird and a carpentry tool. It’s also possible that he meant “heron” to symbolize the prey of a hawk, as he had, at this point in the conversation, figured out that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, his childhood friends, had been corrupted to his detriment by his murderous uncle.
Despite its apparent genesis as a typographical error, “to know a hawk from a hand saw” gained wide currency almost immediately as an idiom meaning “wide-awake, aware and competent” (“He’s a pretty spruce Fellow, Madam, and … knows a Hawk from a Handsaw, as the saying is,” 1677). Interestingly, Shakespeare had used the same type of metaphor in his earlier comedy “The Merry Wives of Windsor” (“We’ll teach him to know Turtles from Jayes”), but that one didn’t catch the public imagination as “to know a hawk from a hand saw” did. Of course, the alliteration of “hawk” and “hand saw” (or “heronshaw”) didn’t hurt, and neither did the presence of “Hamlet” in the core curriculum of schools for many years.
The underlying sense of “to know a hawk from a hand saw,” that of the ability to accurately perceive things as a measure of sanity, awareness, or being “with it,” has taken many other forms in popular culture. Such venerable phrases as “to know the time of day” (1897) or “to know what’s what” (16th century) have been joined by more colorful and jocular measuring sticks such as “to know how many beans make five” (1830), the simpler form “to know beans” (1833), and “to know one’s onions” (1922). The 20th century saw the rise of stronger phrases, most often used in the negative, including “not to know your arse from your elbow” (1930), “not to know one’s rump from a hole in the ground” (1936) and stronger variants, and not to know excrement “from Shinola,” which was a popular brand of shoe polish in the US in the first half of the 20th century. My personal favorite on this theme dials back the vulgarity and goes for the absurd: “Not to know if it’s Piccadilly or Wednesday,” Piccadilly being a street in London (“A piece of ice caught me a devil of a welt on the head and for a moment I didn’t know if it was Piccadilly or Wednesday,” 1918). I know the feeling.
From G.K. Chesterton, Shakespeare and the Germans (public domain) :
There is in Shakespeare something more godlike even than humour : something which the English call fun. The neglect of this by the Germans during the long night of German intellectual domination has produced some preposterous fruits in English, American and other criticism.
The notes in my school books used to be full of alternative explanations, frequently German, of such phrases as: ” I know a hawk from a hand-saw.” Grumpt says that ” hand-saw ” should obviously be heron-shaw, to put it in the same ornithological class with hawk; but Mumpt suggests that there may have been an Elizabethan tool called a hawk, to put it in the same mechanical class with hand-saw.
And all the time even a boy who had any flavour of literature, or any guess at the kind of man that Hamlet was supposed to be, could see at once that it was a joke. Hamlet said it as a piece of wild alliteration ; as he might have said: ” I know a baby from a blunderbuss ” ; or, ” I know a catfish from a croquet-hoop.”
By a deep and dry study of the million exaggerations, inconsistencies and ignorances of Shakespeare they build up a sort of rampart round the unfortunate poet to defend him from his real admirers ; for the sulky Ben Jonson had far more genuine sympathy with Shakespeare than the world-patronising Goethe.
http://www.oldandsold.com/articles11/soldiers-8.shtml
to tell a hawk from a handsaw is to be able to distinguish between a carpentry tool and a plastering tool. A plasterers hawk is a board, about 30cm square with a handle in the centre on one side. the plasterer holds the wet plaster on the hawk and applies it in smaller amounts to the wall with another tool called a float.
As was recently pointed out in a letter to the Wall Street Journal on 5/31/12 in response to the ornithological use of this term by Laura Jacobs in her book review…the hawk being referred to is more likely the mortar board Candy has referenced. Had Shakespeare been referring to a bird he probably would have said “I know a hawk from a hummingbird”…
I live in Norfolk, and there is an old Norfolk word “harnser”, meaning a heron, which I believe became corrupted in Hamlet to “handsaw”. So I agree that the meaning of Hamlet’s comment is that he can tell a hawk from a heron, which makes a great deal more sense than comparing a bird to a carpentry tool!
In response to your questions, yes I’ve heard someone use this phrase aloud; he used it very recently and has used it several times. The ‘world that I live in’ is one in which Canadians exist (I attend a US university, but we’re close enough that we get plenty of Canadian students as well). The person who said it was from Nunavut. It’s apparently a saying up there.
Given that the turtles in “Turtles from Jayes” were almost certainly turtledoves (as also in “The voice of the turtle shall be heard through the land.”), I would bet the metaphorical pair are avian hawks and herons.
However, while Shakespeare would have been familiar with turtledove, jay, hawk and heron the chances of his knowing a hummingbird from a Hawker-Hunter are slim. Hummingbirds disappeared from most of the world 25 million years ago. Modern hummingbirds are confined to the Americas and only became know to Europeans in the course of the 16th century. How far that knowledge would have diffused by the start of the 17th century is anybody’s guess.