Tongs are a simple tool for picking things up when you do not want to touch them with your fingers — because they are hot, dirty, or need to stay clean. The shape is always the same idea: two arms joined at one end, so when you squeeze, the far ends close and grip. You see them everywhere at a Taiwanese night market and at a 燒烤 table: the pair used for turning meat on the grill, the pair sitting in the tray at a bakery for picking up bread, the small pair for putting ice in a glass, the little pair at a hotpot restaurant. There are medical ones too, and big ones for lifting coal or logs out of a fire, which is where the word came from. The important grammar point is that this word is always plural in shape — you say 'the tongs are on the table', never 'a tongs'. If you need to count them, you say 'a pair of tongs', 'two pairs of tongs', exactly the way you do with scissors, glasses and trousers. In everyday speech people usually just say 'the tongs' and everyone knows which pair is meant. You will also hear this word in a fixed phrase from the old days, 'hammer and tongs', which means arguing or fighting very hard: 'They were going at it hammer and tongs.'