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Every since I first started leatherwork, I have been intigued by the name "Camouflage" as applied to a type of leather stamping tools. It was not hard to understand that a beveler, beveled......a seeder made seeds.......a veiner made leaf veins....a backgrounder matted down the background and so on. Of course I knew what camouflage was......the use of camouflage by the military was well known to the public during the time of the War in Vietnam when I was a youth. But as was obvious to me, even as a kid, the tool was not being used in that way for leather tooling. I heard several definitions from various people that tried to use the military sense of the word in defining it's use on leather, but they always failed to convince me since the function of the tool never seemed to be to hide or conceal anything Exploring the eytomology (origin ad derivation) of the word, CAMOUFLAGE. always seemed to lead to a smilar explanation. All of them seemed to refer to the action of hiding, concealing, or veling something from the view of one's enemy. Most of them agreed that the word was of French origin. Recently, I came across something which used the word Camouflage to denote a camelskin covering which the Algerian soldiers, ( who the French were fighting ), used to conceal themselves under and appear as camels lying down at a distance. So you had ...... CAMOU meaning "camel" ....and ......FLAGE, meaning, "to veil". As an example of an early form of military concealment. Hmmmm......... a camel hump. Here was a definition of the tool name that made some sense. The word, Camouflage, was not to define it's function............but rather, it's shape or appearance............that of a camel's hump, or a man concealing himself under a camelskin so as to appear as a camel hump..