The distaff was a stick on which the mass of fibres was held.
In his seventies, Tolstoy asked to be buried on the spot where, as a boy, he and his brother Nikolai had discovered a little green stick, a stick on which, they believed, was inscribed the secret to universal happiness.
In between are walls decorated with Blik's vinyl stick-ons, which merge wallpaper and graphic design, and layouts from ReadyMade magazine that show how to transform Federal Express shipping tubes into CD storage racks.
Only he and his family knew that among his folds was a stick pin on which were the words "underneath all this I'm a nudist".
Barclaycard has launched a stick-on credit card which will allow its 12 million customers the chance to make wave-and-pay purchases from their mobile phone or other item of their choice.
"And just as I believed then, that there is a little green stick, on which is written the secret that will destroy all evil in people, and give them great blessings," Tolstoy wrote in his Recollections (1902), "so now I believe that such a truth exists and that it will be revealed to people and will give them what it promises".
An essay by Golding in his collection A Moving Target opens with the description of a single footprint in what was once the soft mud of a cave in the Auvergne, with a mark alongside made by the stick on which the maker leaned, saving himself from falling.
When the great Hambledon club played Kent in 1783, Underdown reports that the Hambledon scorer "accidentally" mislaid the stick on which runs were recorded by making notches, thus denying Kent a victory that would have cost backers of Hambledon a good deal of money.
I shall never forget those tears or the ivory handled walking stick on which he leaned.
The last time I saw him, he was in a strop, clacking the plastic salad servers he employs for netting fish, threatening to take a bite out of anyone who came too near, and finally returning to the water, though he'd clearly been enjoying a break from it - and all because a tourist had stood beside him and stuck out a stick on the end of which was her smartphone.
If you're still stuck on which one to go for, go for the second, because if you truly loved the first, you wouldn't have fallen for the second.
