Recently I came across a phrase, “two-by-six crashing” in the following paragraph in Dan Brown’s fiction, “Inferno”:
"Langdon had feared as much; the last thing they needed now was to
send a two-by-six crashing through a Vasari canvas – P.265"
I know the word, “two-by-four” as a finished wood used for building that measures two inches wide and four inches deep, but I’m new to “two-by-six (crashing, explosion, shock, impact).”
Google provides a sequence of headings of “two-by-six” as a quote from Dan Brown’s “Inferno” without any definition or meaning of the phrase.
Google N-Gram shows that the phrase has existed since 1820’s. The usage peaked during 1900 to 1920, and is dwindling off to 0.000.000.20% incidence level today.
It seems to me the phrase means an enormous impact, but I’m not sure.
What does “two-by-six” something mean? Is that usage coming back to life?
Best Answer
As the other answers have noted, "a two-by-six" should be interpreted the same way as "a two-by-four", just a slightly larger version; it refers to a particular size of cut lumber.
Your confusion seems to come from mis-parsing the grammar of the sentence. You may be misinterpreting "crashing" as a noun that is being modified by "two-by-six", analogously to the sentence "I would send a large envelope through the mail."
However, in this sentence, "crashing" is a participle modifying "two-by-six", describing the manner in which it would go through the canvas (violently). It should be parsed analogously to the sentences "I will send a ball flying through the air" or "He sent the child laughing from the room." On its own, "two-by-six crashing" is not a phrase with any particular meaning.
An alternate way to phrase the sentence might be, "the last thing they needed now was to cause a two-by-six board to crash through a Vasari canvas."