the.com/shaft
the part doing the actual work while the wheel takes the credit.
means A long, slender rod or column — whether the spinning rod that transmits power in a machine, the handle of a tool, a beam of light, or a vertical passage sunk into the earth.
from From Old English 'sceaft,' meaning the shaft of a spear or an arrow — a straight wooden pole. It has solid Germanic relatives, like Old Norse 'skapt' and German 'Schaft,' and is probably tied to a root meaning 'to scrape' or 'shave,' since a shaft was a length of wood pared down smooth and straight. From that spear-pole the word reached outward to anything long and thin: the shaft of a column, a shaft of sunlight, a mine shaft, and eventually the spinning rods inside our machines. The modern slang 'to get shafted' leans on that same old image of being run through with a pole.
- engineering
- transmits torque from one spinning end to another
- mining
- vertical tunnels can plunge over two miles deep
- anatomy
- the long straight bone or feather core
- slang
- to be cheated, betrayed, or thoroughly wronged
- cinema
- 1971 hero too cool for the Hays Code era
shaft 1971 film — richard roundtree detective film that launched the blaxploitation genre in hollywood
minoan palace at knossos — cretan structure containing central ceremonial shaft graves from 1700 bce
persian qanat system — ancient underground irrigation shafts in iran still used today, some 2500 years old