Why Motor Terminal Boxes are Called Peckerheads
Mid-morning on the job and Ted, an electrician, directs Jim, his new apprentice “Now we are going to start installing the sealtite from the starters to the motors. So go ahead and cut the whips to length, making them long enough to include some drip slack. Then go get some fittings and open up the peckerheads.”
Jim starts thinking… Huh? Peckerheads? Okay he thinks he is going to mess with me again today. I heard about all this stuff when I was in trade school and yesterday he sent me to the van for some wire stretcher. But I played him pretty good and got some good phone time with my girlfriend out there before coming back in and acting stupid. They all laughed at me but the joke is on them… Dummies. The day before it was the old lame left-handed crescent wrench they sent me to get. Ha! This is too easy! You know for an electrician, he sure is a bonehead if not a peckerhead himself! Wait a minute. Is he calling me a peckerhead?
Jim then called out smiling confidently “Hey Ted! You’re the peckerhead if you think I’m falling for this stuff again today!”
Ted rolled his eyes and laughed “Okay let’s go have our coffee before starting with the motor terminations.” Then he crouched down at one of the motors grabbing the odd-shaped wiring terminal box on it. “But before we do I just want you to know this is actually called a peckerhead.”
At coffee break around the gangbox, Ted tells the other two electricians that Jim did not know what a peckerhead was and they all laughed a bit remembering they were once apprentices who got their balls busted by the licensed guys. One of the other licensed guys pointed out that they probably did not teach Jim what a peckerhead was in trade school because these days it would be considered offensive to overly-sensistive peckerheads. They all laughed.
After they convinced Jim the word peckerhead was in fact electrical trade slang known for years that refers to a motor-mounted terminal box and that he would not be laughed at under-breath for calling them that, he then asked “Well where does that name come from?” They all looked at each other. None of them knew.
It was getting toward the end of the day when Gene, an older-than-dirt electrical project manager, dropped by to go over progress with the lead electrician. So Ted asked him “Hey Gene do you know where the term peckerhead for motor boxes came from?” Gene looked around and responded “What none of you know that? It is near folklore.” Then he looked at Jim the apprentice and says “Don’t let these guys get to you. They don’t know as much as they think they do.” They all laughed. Gene went on to tell the story of the origination of the word peckerhead…
Check Out Our Slang Glossary Here
Some years ago down in Alabama there lived a farmer named Chuck and his family. They had some livestock and growing corn was their mainstay crop.
One day a heavy torrential rain left the farm flooded so badly the barn cellar filled with water covering half the stairs. This was not the first time the barn cellar got flooded and Chuck had an old electric pump set up in the corner of the barn with the sump piping run down to the cellar floor.
The barn cellar hole was flooded so badly that the old underground service that came through the fieldstone foundation and the service equipment in the cellar were submerged so Chuck had shut off the power to the barn.
So Chuck and Alfredo his son hauled a trailer-mounted generator to the barn and Chuck told Alfredo to run the cable directly to the pump motor. When he routed the cable to the pump motor he then yelled back to Chuck…
“Hey you mean you want me to run the cable into this here picker head lookin’ thingee on the motor?”
Chuck replied back “Yeah that picker head lookin thingee ya pickerhead!”
Now if you could see what a corn picker head looks like you will understand why Alfredo might have called it that…
Down at the grain store Chuck told the story of the barn flooding and how Alfredo called the motor box a picker head. Before long everyone in that Alabama county was calling motor terminal boxes pickerheads and since then it has of course metamorphised nationwide into the word peckerhead.
After Gene was done telling the story he says “Now all you peckerheads get back to work and make good numbers for me and next week I might tell you where the terms wabbit and wabbit gun came from!”
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