Boast: From Bragging to Stone Dressing

In everyday speech, to boast is to brag, to talk oneself up, to make claims louder than the facts justify. A person boasts about a promotion, a possession, a skill. The word carries a note of vanity or overstatement.

In construction, a boast is a preparatory dressing of stone using a broad chisel, typically 3 to 4 inches wide. The mason strikes the chisel with a hammer to remove the rough quarry face and create a reasonably flat surface. This is not the final finish, which comes later with finer tools like the point chisel or a toothed comb. The boast is the intermediate stage, roughing out the ashlar or facing stone before more delicate work begins. The resulting surface is called a boasted face.

The metaphor runs deep but not quite in the direction one might expect. To boast a stone is not to enlarge it or make it seem bigger than it is. Rather, it is to bring the stone closer to a true state, to reveal its working surface beneath the quarry skin. The word may derive from an old sense of 'boost' or 'thrust out', reflecting the action of the chisel striking away excess material. By the 19th century, the term was standard in British masonry and remains so in traditional stone work and heritage building.

Other trades use related terms differently. Metalworkers speak of bolstering or drawing down; carpenters rough-plane and dimension. But stone workers alone kept the name boast for this specific stage of dressing, perhaps because the work itself, like bragging, is a kind of assertion, a making-visible of what the stone can become through skill and force.