Saw

The word saw may be one of several homographs. AWE has articles on:

• the past tense inflection of the irregular verb 'to see'
• the distinction between the two homophonous nouns 'a saw', and a related verb 'to saw', at saw (disambiguation)
  • the observant among our readers may spot that the above implies a distinction between two verb forms,
    • the irregular verb 'to saw', meaning 'to cut'
    • the past tense inflection of the irregular verb 'to see'

A seesaw (or see-saw) is nowadays a child's game, consisting of a long plank balanced evenly on a central pivot. One (or sometimes more) child sits at each end, so that a rhythm may be established in which first one, then the other, rises or falls. The word seesaw (or see-saw) can be used figuratively as a metaphor for any repetitive 'to-and-fro' movement, or as an adjective to describe such movements, as when military writers describe the Second World War campaigns in North Africa, when first the Germans, then the British, the Germans again and finally the British travelled thousands of miles eastwards, or westwards, across the coastal deserts as "see-saw campaigns, or the passing of a weaver's shuttle on a loom. This is most commonly heard, perhaps, in the nursery rhyme "See-saw, Margery Daw", which, OED suggests, may well use a working chant by sawyers in the days when most timber was divided into planks by the manual labour of a pair of sawyers working at opposite ends of a two-handed saw.