As I remember from my early days, I'm 62 now, I had been told
It's to keep the carving knife from sliding down the fork and cutting
your hand,
Like the gauntlet on a sword
They also made some that would fold out to keep the fork tines off the
table when you set it down,


A
"Blinky the Shark" > wrote in message
news
>
> This is a screen capture from a film I'm watching -- "The Third
> Man", a
> 1949 noir set in Austria right after WWII. A bird is being carved.
> What
> is the rod that my arrow is pointing to, that sticks perpendicularly
> out
> of the fork. I've not seen this before. But, of course, I do live
> under
> the sea (not far from an octopus's garden).
>
> http://blinkynet.net/stuff/fork.jpg
>
>
> --
> Blinky
> Killing all posts from Google Groups
> The Usenet Improvement Project: http://improve-usenet.org
> Blinky: http://blinkynet.net
>