Cheap Carabiners - Hang your Keys off These, but Climb at Your Peril!

Or names for things you did not know had names.  Recently, a friend of mine lost their keys. I asked if it was the set with the silver carabiner. My friend was surprised to learn that the silver hook carried around all these years had a name. If I am honest, I had similarly been searching all these years for an excuse to use the word carabiner. Writing it here in this post I did not even know how to spell it, because I had only ever heard it said once, on a school holiday learning to climb and abseil. I just associated it in my mind with the Caribbean and thought it was a funny word to use for something so functional that could potentially save your life.  I am disappointed now to see that it is spelt nothing like Caribbean, or caribeena, carrebeena, or whatever else might come to mind. Of course, having written all those down, I have now successfully ensured that I will never be able to spell it correctly again either. My Collins dictionary informs me that the word can also in fact be spelt ‘karabiner’. It comes from a German word ‘Karabinerhaken’ or carbine hook, which is a type of hook used to attach a carbine to a belt – a carbine being a type of light rifle. Strangely, the word ‘carbine’ comes from Old French ‘carabin’ which may be a variant form of ‘escarrabin’ or one who prepares corpses for burial. That in turn comes from Latin ’scarabaeus’, a kind of beetle, it seems. From beetles, to corpses to rifles and life-saving hooks…

However, the interesting thing is not so much the spelling or etymology as the delight my friend had in discovering that an object they had been innocently carrying around nameless and blameless in their pocket for years, had a name. The name makes it functional, socially useful and somehow different from the intriguing clippy piece of metal. I am still pondering the effects of naming something. It obviously tidies something up mentally, but is this at the risk of making it more banal? I thought it might be interesting to explore this empirically, so I have gone on a quest to find names for other things that often go nameless.

It seems that there are quite a number of websites which introduce all the ‘names of things you didn’t know had names’, like this one. Reading the lists I experience a mixture of surprise and indignation that anyone would bother to give such a thing a name or attempt to force me to learn it. On the other hand, some of the names are so enchanting that you wonder why they have been so long neglected. Here are a couple more to ponder:

Aglet

The small sheath at the end of a shoelace from Old French aiguillette meaning ‘little needle’. Now that makes sense and is also quite endearing methinks. How useful it could be: ‘This lace has no aglet!’ ‘My aglet is broken!’ ‘The lace poking out of the end of the aglet has frayed’.

Wamble

This is a good one. It means to move unsteadily, feel nausea or to have one’s stomach growl. Particularly useful on a ship if you are going hungry from sea sickness. According to the Collins English Dictionary it’s from the C14 wamelen ‘to feel ill’, which appears to be related to Norwegian vamla meaning ‘to stagger’. It makes me think of the wombles in a new light. Wambling free.  Oh boundless borborygmus! In fact, it seems there is no direct connection between wombles and wambling (wombling aside).  So legend has it, the author of the series of Womble books was walking with her children on Wimbledon Common when one of them referred to it as Wombledon Common. There you have it.

And finally…there is a lovely list of unusual words here and a page of humorous attempts to make use of them here.  But for now, I must leave further inaniloquence to another day.