Finding a pin
Finding a pin was lucky in an old saying, as long as you stooped to pick it up. Pins are now so cheap that a found pin raises a different question: how plenty changes what you value.
What it may mean
For centuries pins were made by hand, one at a time, and they were worth saving. Households kept them in pincushions and cases, and people bent down for a stray pin as readily as for small change; the old rhyme about stooping for a pin comes from that world. Machines made them cheap in the 1800s, and a pin on the floor is now more likely to be stepped on than kept. Nothing about the pin changed, only how many there were. A found pin is a neat way into a question about what has become cheap in your own life through sheer abundance: messages, photos, compliments, even time with people you see daily. Things do not lose worth just because there are a lot of them; we only stop noticing it.
Depending on how you saw it
A straight pin in the carpet
A pin left in the rug is easy to miss until a bare foot finds it. Small, sharp things hide well in soft places. Is there a small irritation hidden in a comfortable corner of your days that you would rather find now than later?
A safety pin by the curb
The safety pin was patented in New York in 1849 by Walter Hunt, who sold the rights for a small sum to pay a debt. A world-changing idea went for pocket money. Have you been underpricing one of your own ideas because it seemed too simple?
Pins left in a new shirt
New shirts come folded around pins and clips that are easy to miss until one pricks you. What still needs unpinning in something new you have taken on, before it can really fit?
A pin pointing toward you or away
A 1903 collection advised picking up a found pin only if its point faced away from you, after telling of a man who bent down for a pin, only to see his hat roll into the mud and his glasses fall and break. Whatever the direction, a pin is a small thing designed to hold other things together. What small, unglamorous thing has been holding your week together?
Why it happens in nature
Until the 1800s, pins were made by hand in many separate steps, which kept them costly. Machines then made them cheap and plentiful, and today straight pins and safety pins come by the hundred. Pins drop easily in sewing rooms and from new clothes and packaging, and they hide well in carpets and floor cracks.
What folk beliefs say
Scotland
When Mary, Queen of Scots, withdrew to change after her wedding, according to Sir Thomas Randolph's letters, she let every man who could reach her take a pin for good fortune.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 1 (1903), vol. 1, p. 108. View the page
England
Grose, quoted by Brand, wrote that giving a knife, scissors or anything sharp to a friend could cut the friendship, unless a pin, a farthing or some other trifle was taken in return.
Source: John Brand; Henry Ellis (ed.), Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, vol. 3 (1849), vol. 3, p. 250. View the page
England (Westmorland)
In Westmorland, in the north of England, there was a well into which rich and poor alike dropped a pin for good fortune.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 2 (1903), vol. 2, p. 991. View the page
To reflect on
What has become cheap in your life only because there is so much of it?