Why are blond-haired children called “towheads”?
We’ll spare you the blond jokes and get right to the heart of the matter. We searched on “towheads blond why” and were pleased to find this wasn’t like so many of those other etymology questions we tackle that prove difficult, if not impossible, to answer. As we learned from the web site of the Washington Post, there is a pretty straightforward reason why people with white-blond hair are called “towheads.” In colonial times, families grew their own flax to make into fabric for clothing. Transforming the flax into thread was a complicated, involved process with many time-consuming steps. After the flax was harvested, it was soaked in water for several days to soften it so the inner fibers could be removed from the stalk. To separate the long, thin fibers from the shorter
