Word of the day: pothook

It appears in a metaphor atop a metaphor, in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield . The narrator describes the houses on Tommy Traddles’s street: They were all built on one monotonous pattern, and looked like the early copies of a blundering boy who was learning to make houses, and had not yet got out of his cramped brick and mortar pothooks. The Oxford English Dictionary to the rescue. A pothook…