Recently picked up an old "barber's coticule," about 5" x 2.5" x 0.9". I like this size very much for hand-held honing, and look for them when I can.

Anyway, I noticed that the stone has deep grooves or cuts, on the sides only, and only in the BBW portion. These appear to me to be deliberate and not the result of abuse, because both honing surfaces are intact.

I read somewhere on the forum recently that in the heyday of spike point razors, some barbers would round off the sharp points of their customers' spike razors by using the area on the sides of their honing stones. This made perfect sense to me, but I haven't seen an example of it in person until I got this stone (I think...)

So what do y'all think went on here: abuse, or spike-rounding?