DIYbanter - How does the word "spline" mean curved (and why not just use the word curved)?

In article ,
"tdacon" wrote:

"David Howard" wrote in message ...

Garrett Wollman wrote, on Mon, 06 Oct 2014 04:50:01 +0000:

In woodworking, a spline is a long (and perforce rigid) bar of material
used to join two grooved work pieces (essentially acting as a two-sided
"tongue"), running cross-grain and providing greater strength than a
simple butt joint by greatly increasing glue surface area. I suspect
the same sense exists in metalworking as well.

In the boat-building craft, a spline is a long thin strip of wood with very
uniform bending characteristics. It's used in a process called lofting.

In the days before computers did all this, the designer produced a table
called a table of offsets, and the builder laid out the lines of the boat
full-size on a large flat surface (often in the loft of the boat shop, hence
the term lofting). The boat builder laid out the coordinates of points on
the surface from the table of offsets, and then used the spline to fair the
lines of the boat into fair curves. The builder would try to locate the
spline so that it ran through all the points, holding it down in place with
weights called ducks (hence the phrase "get your ducks in a row"). Because
the table of offsets contained coordinates to no better than a sixteenth of
an inch, and also because there were sometimes errors in the table, the
builder would nudge the spline a bit here and there to end up with a fair
curve that went through the points as closely as possible. Only from a fair
curve could you bend a plank to match the lines of the boat.

Tom

Cool.

--
charles