I keep running into the term “plain deal table” in Bristish literature. (Also, rarely, “deal chair”)
E.g 1984 “There was a deal table under the window where he and the old man could talk without fear of being overheard.” Sherlock Holmes, The Red-headed League “There was nothing in the office but a couple of wooden chairs and a deal table, behind which sat a small man with a head that was even redder than mine.”
It always implies crude furniture but I wonder what exactly that means, what would describe that to distinguish it from other cheap tables.
According to some dictionary websites, “deal” in that context means fir or pine construction. I’d always assumed it meant a small table for cards, but apparently not.
I tried google and kept finding cryptic remarks such as this:
“I wonder that Hammett means by a “plain deal table”. How many modern readers have seen what cigarette foil paper looks like? Are Hammett’s wonderful stories slowly becoming unintelligible with the march of time?”
I think it’s worth noting that Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949 and the Holmes books much earlier. I wonder which was the last book to use the word in that context? I’ve only ever seen it in old-fashioned books and crossword puzzles. My dictionary mentions both white deal and red deal, but whenever I’ve bought timber I’ve ordered “softwood” or a specific, named tree.
A table intended to be used for playing cards would always be a card table.
Main Entry: 4deal
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English dele, from Middle Dutch or Middle Low German, plank; akin to Old High German dili plank – more at THILL
Date: 14th century
1 a British : a board of fir or pine b : sawed yellow-pine lumber nine inches (22.5 centimeters) or wider and three, four, or five inches (7.6 to 12.4 centimeters) thick
2 : pine or fir wood
deal adjective
So it sounds like it’s made of plain planks, kind of like a shop workbench.
Modern Shaker tables are rarely made of softwood, and have a simple design but are the opposite of crude. I have quite a bit of Shaker type furniture including a lot of Shaker Workshops stuff which is copied directly from existing antique Shaker furniture. The word has become debased in the furniture industry to mean almost any un-ornamented wooden furniture (still generally hardwood), but it is still far from the British “deal”, denoting cheap pine construction.
Considered an essential piece of furniture in Scotland, a scrubbed softwood kitchen table, often made from deal wood or pine (called “fir” in Scotland), was used for “eating, food preparation, working and even for minor surgical operations such as tonsillectomies.”[99] Gillow produced a drawing in May 1793 for a “common deal dining table” which, being made from a softwood, was probably used in the kitchen.[100] Such single-leaf kitchen tables especially made sense in the tight quarters of tenement house kitchens.[101] Single-leaf tables could be found in Scottish kitchens as late as the 1960s, only losing popularity when the preference for built-in kitchen cabinets and counters came into vogue (Figures 29 and 30).
Seems that besides the type of wood and the simple construction, the look of those tables included a folding side (that is the “leaf”) (figure 29 and 30 in the web page).
I first encountered “deal boards” in a scientific paper written in 1969. I read it about six years later, and it was the first time I’d encountered “deal” used that way. So it was in use twenty years after “1984”, and I suspect is still used that way today.
I had to look it up to find out what the paper was talking about.
I first came across this term in a book about making your own telescope. (I believe the book was a collection of amateur telescope construction articles from the Scientific American periodical - ca 1930’s) .
The book recommended obtaining a deal table and having the top planed flat in order to provide a base for grinding the mirror.
I just did a quick search on Google NGram Viewer for “deal table”. According to that, usage first peaked around 1860 and slowly declined to a low over the years 1980-2000, but has since rebounded to its circa 1900 usage, and is still going up. Maybe it’s the effect of antique fans and Restoration Hardware.
Similarly in Through The Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll, the White Knight has a deal box:
"He was dressed in tin armour, which seemed to fit him very badly, and he had a queer-shaped little deal box fastened across his shoulder, upside-down, and with the lid hanging open. Alice looked at it with great curiosity. ‘I see you’re admiring my little box.’ the Knight said in a friendly tone. ‘It’s my own invention—to keep clothes and sandwiches in. You see I carry it upside-down, so that the rain can’t get in.’
‘But the things can get OUT,’ Alice gently remarked. ‘Do you know the lid’s open?’"
My understanding of “deal” is that it meant cheap or low quality. These days it would be chipboard or fibreboard, but before those things were invented, a cheap table would be made from any old wood that wasn’t good enough for quality furniture and it would be made by a joiner rather than a cabinet maker.
In Ireland we use the terms “white deal” and “red deal” to refer to the soft pine that skirting boards (and other mouldings and architraves) are made of. See examples. The OED tells me it’s related to a modern Dutch word “deel” meaning “plank”. It’s unrelated to the word deal as in “a good deal” or “dealer”.
(Is there a word for two words that are both spelled and pronounced identically - that are both homographs and homophones?)