During my public school years teachers would frequently write PLO on blackboards as a signal to custodians to not erase what was written, during nightly cleaning—Please Leave On.
That we were all returning home each evening to watch news of the PLO—the Palestinian Liberation Organization—was somehow ignored by everyone but me.
In grade 7 we had an all-school assembly, presented by a farm safety group, to talk about the dangers of the PTO, and getting caught up in it, something the farm kids understood intuitively that was lost on the rest of us.
It wasn’t until much later that I learned it stands for Power Take Off, the spinning gizmo off the end of tractors from which all manner of farm implements can be powered.
Browsing the KitchenAid mixer attachments website today, I realized that their stand mixers have what amounts to a PTO; they call it an attachment hub. You can attach a pasta roller, a sausage maker, or a juice squeezer.
What’s remarkable is that KitchenAid supports “cross-generational attachment compatibility” meaning that attachments from the 1930s can be used on modern mixers.
In an era when phone charger standards change with the season, this is a commendable buttress against obsolescence.
