What is both worn by academics and used by bricklayers?

Answer 1

Mortarboard is both worn by academics and used by bricklayers.

The cap worn by academic is called a mortarboard but literally mortar board is the wooden plate, usually with a handle underneath, on which bricklayers carry small amounts of mortar.

Mortarboard is a board for carrying mortar: a square board with a handle in the center of the underside, used by bricklayers or masons to hold or carry mortar. Mortarboard also refers to an academic hat often worn on formal academic occasions such as graduation, consisting of a round black cap with a close-fitting crown surmounted by a stiff, flat and a hard square flat top from which a tassel hangs.

What seems to have happened is that the similarity in shape between the brickie’s board and the academic cap led some wag, probably at Oxford University, to apply the name of the one to the other.

The first recorded use is in a book of 1853–6, The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, an Oxford Freshman by a clergyman named Edward Bradley, with the pen name of Cuthbert Bede. Verdant Green is a sort of undergraduate Pickwick and the book recounts his adventures. This magisterial reprimand by a don appears after one such escapade: “I will overlook your offence in assuming that portion of the academical attire, to which you gave the offensive epithet of "mortar-board"; more especially, as you acted at the suggestion and bidding of those who ought to have known better”. This book became a huge success. Whether Mr Bradley invented the slang term we may never know, but his book certainly popularised the term to call the cap worn by academics - "mortarboard" which is a symbol of ancient honor and distinction that carries grave responsibilities.♥

Answer 2

A Mortar board

The square academic cap, very commonly called a mortarboard (from the French mortier, a type of toque), is an item of academic headgear consisting of a horizontal square board fixed upon a skull-cap, with a tassel, or liripipe, attached to the centre. It is also often termed a square or trencher in the UK and Australia; in the U.S., it is usually referred to more generically as a cap. Its colloquial name derives from its resemblance to the board upon which mortar is placed by a bricklayer.

The cap, together with the gown and (sometimes) a hood, now form the customary uniform of a university graduate, in many parts of the world, following an Anglo-American model.

Mortar is a material used in masonry to fill the gaps between blocks in construction. The blocks may be stone, brick, breeze blocks (cinder blocks), etc. Mortar is a mixture of sand, a binder such as cement or lime, and water and is applied as a paste which then sets hard.

A bricklayer will use a mortar board to hold the mortar.

From dictionary.com:

Mortar board. (a) A small square board with a handle beneath, for holding mortar; a hawk. (b) A cap with a broad, projecting, square top; -- worn by students in some colleges.

Answer 3

Mortar Board.

Answer 4

Mortar board hat for academians. Mortar board for mixing mortar for bricklayers.

Answer 5

mortarboards