Thread: Some say strap, some say strop. OED to the rescue!

My friend mslovacek who introduced me to straight razors several years ago (and introduced the word hoglahoo to the English language) also introduced to me the razor strap, which he called a strop. Most members here call it a strop, and many strap manufacturers emblazen the word strop on their products as well as in their names such as the Illinois Strop Company.

Below is the part where I muse to myself and enjoy recalling some of my earlier straight razor shaving days. For brevity's sake, please skip over it quickly

A few months into joining SRP I happened to start talking to some of my guy friends and family about old time shaving and found out that without fail anyone who I met who had actually used a straight razor back in the day called it a strap. And it made sense to me. It is in fact just a strap of material. Why strop? I theorized that maybe the English used the word strap but pronounced it in such a way that some Americans misunderstood the phonetic differences between American English and British English and assumed that since strap sounded like strop to them, they assumed it was spelled strop. whew!

On to my recent re-discovery! I don't know how much I can legally reproduce here, but I will take my chances with a short excerpt in jpeg format. I looked up the word strap in the Oxford English Dictionary printed in 1985 and found among its definitions this one below (#8). I don't know exactly how to read some of the OED abbreviations as I am a little lazy to look them up again (I keep forgetting) but it appears that "razor-strop: = Strop sb. 3." is referring to that specific definition of strop elsewhere in the OED (so, a strap is a strop. thank you.) Obs = obsolete and "exc. dial." I assume means "except dialectical" (which makes me again wonder if this was just a rural American thing that has since died out from its widespread usage with the reduced necessity of razor-straps as technology evolved.)

My favo(u)rite line is the 1859 reference from "Dict. Amer. (ed. 2) which states that

a razor-strop is, with us, generally called a razor-strap.

Apparently, it was just an American thing and not even used to the exclusion of razor-strop. Strop is foreign to me. Strap makes sense and people who are not familiar with straight razor lingo know what I mean when I say "I have to use a leather strap to keep my razor sharp." Trivial or not, it's interesting to some degree

Thanks for reading, I have enjoyed it