A sweater is basically a bunch of tubes held together. We knit those tubes in the round. However, there are a few places where the needs of the body outweigh the needs of the tube. The least avoidable of these is the neck. Sure, you can make a boatneck or wide neck sweater with yoked or raglan sleeves and then you're not breaking the tube.
However, that's not how traditional knitters managed their un-tubing. They invented a way to keep knitting in the round all the way to the top of the sweater while still making something that would have shape as though it were a flat piece of fabric. This invention was steeking. The difference between a tube and a flat piece of fabric is that a flat piece of fabric has edges and a tube doesn't.
A steek is where an edge is made by cutting (literally, with scissors and all) the knitted tube. If you just cut willy-nilly into knitted fabric it would fall to pieces. A thing that makes knitting so attractive to metaphorists is that each stitch needs its neighbours to survive. So steeking requires a bit of effort on the knitter's part to save the fabric after it's been cut into.
My armhole steeks (which were simple and didn't involve errors along the lines of my neck steeks) looked like this while I was knitting them.
What you see (left to right) is the bit of the sweater below the armhole, the stitches for the underarm held on a bit of white scrap yarn, followed by the steek. The steek is the bit that gets cut. The sleeve stitches are picked up along the far side of the steek. Because you're going to cut through the threads, it's a good idea to have a close-packed pattern on the steek stitches. I opted for a 1X1 chequer board (except on rows that had only one colour), but I think next time I'd go for a nice stripe.
I know I have barely started the story of what a steek is, but I've also been working on this post for an inordinate amount of time (I keep getting interrupted), so I think I'd better continue the story tomorrow.
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