Originally published 4 April 1994
What is a fluglebinder?
OK, it’s a trick question. There is no way you could know the answer unless you happened to see a Tom Cruise movie called Cocktail.
In the film, the Cruise character muses on the fortune that might be made by cornering the market on, say, those little plastic tips at the ends of shoelaces. His girlfriend adds, “They’ve probably got one of those weird names, like fluglebinders.”
So what are those things really called? Yes, they have a name, two names actually, which the Oxford English Dictionary traces back to the Renaissance, or about the time lace-up shoes came into style.
Well, not into style exactly, but into widespread use.
Shoelaces were used used by common folk during the early days. The gentry wore buckles on their shoes, or at the very least laces made of silk ribbons. It wasn’t until the more democratic 19th century that shoestrings became universal, and the production of — ah, call them fluglebinders for the moment — became big business. At first they were made of crimped or spiraled metal; plastic came later.
Like all useful products of technology, the metal or plastic tips of shoelaces have a history and a name. Our familiarity with the names of useful things is probably a pretty good measure of our comfort level with technology.
My father was a great one for names. Most of us can identify a hammer’s “claw.’ My dad could bang off a name for every part of a hammer. Claw, eye, cheek, neck, poll, face, handle. He could have told you too the names of half-a-dozen kinds of hammers, from ball peen to rip.
He reveled in technical terms. Fascia and coping. Dado and rabbet. Mortise and tenon. Ratchet and pawl. I learned most of these terms standing by my father’s side in his basement workshop, but I’m not sure how well I retain what I learned. I’m always getting gusset mixed up with grommet, and rafter mixed up with joist. But not my old man. He was the only one in the neighborhood who could tell you the name for the thin wooden strips between the panes of a window.
Muntins. And did he know the name for the plastic tips of shoestrings? I don’t remember.
He did know the names for all kinds of washers, pins, bolts, and screws. I memorized the names from the labels on the bottles lined up on the shelf over his workbench. Cut, fender, finish, internal tooth, external tooth, and split-ring washers. Clevis, cotter, hitch, and tension pins. He was comfortable with this stuff. The names were like incantations, evoking the magic of technology.
He was happiest of all when he was under the hood of our 1936 Ford. Carburetor. Water pump. Alternator. Solenoid. Cam. Tappet. The names danced on his tongue. They were the elements of a poem. When the engine ran smooooth it was pure poetry.
Now, I look under the hood of my 1993 Mazda and my mouth goes dry. I can’t name a thing. I see a packed contrivance of a thousand parts, all of them utterly foreign, controlled by computer chips buried deep within the heap. Uuh, is that the starter motor? The distributor? Damned if I know.
A VCR has vastly more parts than a hammer, but I can’t name one of them, unless you count “button.” It’s a black box. It might as well have been dumped in my house by aliens from space. Language lets me down. What we can’t name, we can’t understand.
The April [1994] issue of Discover magazine has a wonderful photographic essay on mummified corpses discovered by archeologists in the Xinjiang Province of China. The mummies are nearly 4,000 years old. They are ordinary people, not pharaohs or kings. They were buried with their worldly goods, and these things too have been beautifully preserved.
Pins. Needles. Cups. Bowls. Knives. Spoons. Spindle whorls. Hooks. Bells. The mummies of Xinjiang were buried with their vocabulary, and a handsome vocabulary it was. Leather, fur, feather, felt. Warp and weft. Bracelet. Braid. And, yes, they even had something equivalent to the plastic tips at the ends of laces.
The photographs in Discover suggest a life lived in harmony with simple things, a life made comfortable with the music of the names of things — a music I heard in my father’s workshop.
Within my lifetime we have become alienated from our useful possessions. We are the possessors of black boxes. We haven’t the foggiest idea how they work. The names of their parts are known only to the people who designed them, or who fix them when they break. When was the last time you saw your next-door neighbor bending over the fender of his car adjusting the gaps of plugs with a gauge? Gaps? Plugs? Gauge?
Fluglebinders? Those things on the tips of shoestrings are called tags, or aglets. Simple names for a simple thing.
But just try to do without them.
