fettle vs pluck

fettle

noun
  • The act of fettling. 

  • Sand used to line a furnace. 

  • One's mental state; spirits. 

  • a seam line left by the meeting of mold pieces. 

  • A person's mood or state, often assuming the worst. 

  • A state of proper physical condition; kilter or trim. 

verb
  • To make preparations; to put things in order; to do trifling business. 

  • To line the hearth of a furnace with sand prior to pouring molten metal. 

  • To sort out, to fix, to mend, to repair. 

  • To be upset or in a bad mood. 

  • In ceramics, to remove (as by sanding) the seam lines left by the meeting of two molds. 

pluck

noun
  • An instance of plucking or pulling sharply. 

  • Guts, nerve, fortitude or persistence. 

  • The lungs, heart with trachea and often oesophagus removed from slaughtered animals. 

  • Cheap wine. 

verb
  • To take or remove (someone) quickly from a particular place or situation. 

  • To pull something sharply; to pull something out 

  • To pull or twitch sharply. 

  • To remove feathers from a bird. 

  • To play a string instrument pizzicato. 

  • To gently play a single string, e.g. on a guitar, violin etc. 

  • Of a glacier: to transport individual pieces of bedrock by means of gradual erosion through freezing and thawing. 

How often have the words fettle and pluck occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )