Organ building

Until electric blowers arrived, no organ could sound without a second person, and German still has the word for him: der Kalkant, who trod the bellows so that there was wind in the chest. The name is Latin through and through. It comes from calcare, to tread, a verb built on calx, the heel, so a Kalkant is quite literally the one treading. English has kept the same verb, well hidden, in a word that left the organ loft long ago: to inculcate goes back to inculcare, to tread something in with the heel, which is a fair picture of how a rule gets into a pupil. The job has almost vanished, but where a historic instrument is still winded by foot it comes back, and so does the word. Mind the endings when it does: Kalkant is a weak noun, so the organist thanks den Kalkanten.