honey-dipper

honey-dipper (plural honey-dippers)

1. Alternative form of honey dipper.
   1. A turned kitchen tool used to transfer honey.
      • 1991 July 27, Sandra Loy, “Country skills go on display”, in Herald Express, number 20,138, Devon, page II:

        He specialises in small items such as light pulls, ornamental eggs, and honey-dippers — and in true environmental fashion, Nick lets nothing go to waste.

      • 1991 December 24, Sandy Dees-Baker, “Stocking stuffers: Grocery stores provide endless possibilites for the innovative Christmas shopper”, in Anderson Independent-Mail, volume 92, number 84, Anderson, S.C., page 1B, column 2:

        Older stuffees may appreciate a variety of teas or coffees, perhaps with a honey-dipper and small jar of honey thrown in.

      • 1992 February 5, Graeme O’Neill, “Insight into chimp culture”, in The Age, 138th year, number 42,645, Melbourne, Vic., page 9:

        Not only do they use twigs to fish termites out of their mounds, they use them as honey-dippers when they find wild-bee hives, and as picks to extract fatty marrow from the bones of the monkeys they sometimes kill for meat.

      • 1997 July 11, “Today’s Times-Dispatch FREE FOR ALL coupon!”, in Richmond Times-Dispatch, 147th year, number 192, Richmond, Va., page B3:

        FREE Honey-Dipper or Keychain

      • 2002 March 14, Travis Semmes, “State boasts 60 different species of ceanothus”, in Santa Cruz Sentinel, volume 72, Santa Cruz, Calif., page C-2, column 1:

        I’ve found the wood of older ceanothus shrubs to be good for carving items like spoons, and I imagine it’d work well for hand-turned items like honey-dippers, candle holders, etc.

      • 2004 November 5, Cate McQuaid, “Painter looks at life through a lens”, in The Boston Globe, volume 266, number 128, Boston, Mass., page D20:

        Ackling finds pieces of driftwood along the shore, or interesting wooden clothespins, finials, and honey-dippers in an antique market.

      • 2017, Naomi Shihab Nye, “Bees Were Better”, in If Bees are Few, University of Minnesota Press; quoted in Ted Kooser, “American Life in Poetry: Meditation on bees”, in Sunday Monitor, Concord, N.H., 2017 November 26, page D7:

        I wrote a paper proclaiming their brilliance and superiority and revised it at a small café featuring wooden hive-shaped honey-dippers in silver honeypots at every table.

   2. A worker who collects household sewage from sewage tanks.
      • 1991 November 11, Kelly Gilbert, “Marina, manager convicted on pollution charges”, in The Evening Sun, volume 164, number 17, Baltimore, Md., page B3, column 6:

        “He deliberately dumped sewage into the grate [atop the storm drain] whenever an emergency arose,” [Jane F.] Barrett continued. “God forbid that he should have to pay a honey-dipper to come out and clean up the septic systems” on the site.

      • 1993 April 19, John Parris, “‘The Little Brown Shack Out Back’ is now a rare rural sight”, in Asheville Citizen-Times, volume 124, number 109, Asheville, N.C., page 1B, column 2:

        The experience led to his new book “Outhouse Humor”, which is a collection of jokes, stories, songs, and poems about outhouses, and thunder-mugs, corncobs and honey-dippers, wasps and spiders and Sears Roebuck catalogues.

      • 1997 March 10, Christina Rogers, “What do you like, or dislike, about your hometown?”, in Daily Journal, Franklin, Ind., page 25, column 4:

        As a boy, he worked with the town honey-dipper to raise money for his family. This job was necessary before Greenwood had indoor plumbing.

      • 1998 February 12, Mike Stauffer, “Town goes out to bid on innovative fertilizer plant: Extra land may be used as soccer complex”, in The Taos News, volume XXXIX, number 30, Taos, N.M., page A3, columns 2–3:

        “The bid will be about $750,000, but we’ve included the addition of a pump site for honey-dippers,” Peralta said, the term used to describe companies that collect waste from septic tanks.

      • 1998 June 11, Charlene Nevada, “Health Commission will try to collar cats: Measure would apply to felines allowed to roam. Akron health officials warn of raccoon rabies outbreak”, in The Beacon Journal, Akron, Oh., page C6, column 2:

        Members of the City Council last looked at cat control in 1992, when Councilman John Conti, D-9, then a freshman, introduced legislation to ban cats from running at large and to require owners to basically be their cat’s personal honey-dipper.

      • 1998 September 2, Frank Ritter, “Be careful which job you look down upon as menial”, in The Tennessean, volume 94, number 245, Nashville, Tenn., page 11A, columns 5–6:

        And the school teacher’s social status was higher than that of the “honey-dipper” — but was that fair? To answer that question, you have to know what a honey-dipper did. He was the man who came around regularly to tip over the wooden, outdoor toilets, scoop up the excrement and haul it away in a truck. […] Honey-dippers had a sweaty, stinky job — and some people would make jokes about them, laugh, put them down. But if you think about it, you realize that if the honey-dippers hadn’t done their job, school would have had to be closed because of the health risk.

      • 2000 January 3, Jack Jones, “Purity rules on quiet eastern lakes: Skaneateles, Otisco are purest of lakes”, in The Ithaca Journal, Ithaca, N.Y., page 4A, column 1:

        Those cottages, where no adequate new systems can be installed in shale soils, continue to be served by “honey-dippers,” two-person crews that pump effluents from holding tanks and ferry them away by boat for proper disposal.

      • 2005 December 4, Ashley Powers, “Buyers hoping to get away from it all can’t escape masses”, in Chicago Tribune, 159th year, number 338, Chicago, Ill., section 16, page 44, column 1:

        A sewer system, constructed in the 1980s, replaced the community’s colossal holding tank and the man called the “honey-dipper” who cleaned it.