Listen to this episode and find out more information about the topics therein at theallusionist.org/ravels
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, have been having an argument since this time last year about whether language is more tender if you brine it.
In today’s episode: we’ve got knitting, we’ve got eponyms, we’ve got knitting eponyms - which come with a whole load of battles, f-boys, duels, baseball, scandals, and socks, lots of socks.
Content warning: there are mentions of war and death.
On with the show.
HZ: I, brought my current knitting project to show you.
MIRIAM FELTON: Ooh, yes, please.
HZ: My first experiment with colour work beyond horizontal stripes.
MIRIAM FELTON: Oh, I love colour work.
HZ: And so I’m just knitting this big, long sausage with different patterns that I've improvised.
MIRIAM FELTON: Aaayyy! I love it.
I am Miriam Felton, also known as Mim on the internet, and I am a textile artist and a paper artist - primarily textiles, but I'm also a history nerd, so I love getting into the deep history of the terminology, of the act of making things, all sorts of stuff like that.
HZ: Now I think a lot of people I would not assume that knitting might be a hotbed of problematic vocabulary, but prove them wrong!
MIRIAM FELTON: Well, have I got stories for you. There's actually a big movement in the knitting world and there was some big, big drama, and a big ol’ split between the right and the left in the knitting world.
HZ: Uh oh!
MIRIAM FELTON: One of the things that I'm really passionate about changing is the term ‘kitchener’. Kitchener stitch is a form of grafting. It's this technique to get two sets of live stitches connected to each other in a way that's seamless, that looks exactly like you knitted it continuously.
HZ: Live stitches?
MIRIAM FELTON: Live stitches are the stitches that are on your needle. So, like, loose, unbound-off stitches - live stitches.
HZ: I don’t think I have ever kitchenered.
MIRIAM FELTON: Kitchener is, well, grafting. I think we should call it grafting. Grafting is really handy, especially for the ends of toes, like when you're closing up a sock. The terminology for kitchener stitch comes up right around the First World War, in publications in England. The government asked everyone to knit. And so a lot of government pamphlets started coming out about knitting, and they basically renamed grafting after Lord Kitchener.
HZ: Was it based on Kitchener grafting things together himself?
MIRIAM FELTON: No; I think, as with most of these things, they're just named after people. The people themselves don't really have much association with it. Like the Earl of Cardigan didn't ever wear a cardigan as far as we know.
HZ: What? What??
MIRIAM FELTON: Except possibly like, you know, in his dotage.
HZ: Huh? I assumed that he was out there on the battlefields in a cardigan.
MIRIAM FELTON: - repping the cardigan.
HZ: What the hell?
MIRIAM FELTON: Like a nice fair isle one with all the stranded colour work? That would have been awesome.
HZ: Just some kind of frontally divided knitted garment. But no?
MIRIAM FELTON: No.
HZ: What?!
MIRIAM FELTON: Not as far as we have any evidence.
HZ: The cardigan is one of the several knitwear trends to come out of the Crimean War, waged between 1853 to 1856, Russia versus an alliance of the Ottoman Empire, France, Sardinia and the UK. Like many wars, the Crimean War was the source of a lot of innovation. I’d still take less innovation in favour of less war - 600,000 people died in this conflict - but the Crimean War gets the credit for the invention of the portable stove; and medical practitioners washing their hands before tending to injured soldiers; and the first instances of war photography and journalists reporting from the frontline; and advances in telegraphy. And, knitwear trends: the aforementioned cardigan; the raglan sleeve, named after Lord Cardigan's commanding officer; and the balaclava, named after the Battle of Balaclava where a lot of British soldiers were supposedly wearing them, made by the women back home who had been encouraged to knit warm clothing for soldiers to wear on these cold battlegrounds.
MIRIAM FELTON: A balaclava is a - Americans don't know what a balaclava is.
HZ: Like a knitted helmet.
MIRIAM FELTON: But with eye and mouth holes. Kind of a ski mask. Maybe they should make a comeback because all the surveillance state, and then if we start the revolution, maybe we'll need to knit balaclavas.
HZ: It's too hot! Climate change has made it too hot.
MIRIAM FELTON: It's true. We could knit them out of cotton. Yeah, the Battle of Balaclava and 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', which there's that famous poem about: Lord Cardigan was the main guy for the Light Brigade charge.
HZ: But not wearing a cardigan.
MIRIAM FELTON: Not wearing a cardigan.
HZ: This is extremely disillusioning.
HZ: Alright, let’s talk about the eponymous Lord Cardigan.
Cardigans the garment are named after James Brudenell, the 7th Earl of Cardigan - and the first Earl of Chaos, according to my honours system. He got into fights at school, and as an adult while out campaigning during his career as a politician; he had an affair with his friend’s wife who then became his wife, and challenged her cousin to a duel (this marriage didn’t last); he got arrested for another duel, but when the court case rolled around he was acquitted of the attempted murder charge because… well, he was a rich aristocrat. But he was denied various honours from Queen Victoria because of his scandalous romantic life and extra-marital sexploits - at one point he was sued for what was euphemistically called ‘criminal conversation’ (to be fair to Lord Cardigan, I don’t think people should be sued for having consensual, legal sex) - a private detective had hidden under the sofa upon which said criminal conversation took place and reported that Cardigan wore his spurs throughout the encounter…
Wait, there’s more! When he was chosen to accompany the Prince of Wales on an expedition, he was sent home in disgrace, because he challenged so many people to duels... He got an army captain arrested for serving what he deemed to be the wrong wine... And during his decades in the military, while he allegedly spent upwards of the modern equivalent of £1m per year on new clothes and horses for his regiment, he refused to travel on the same ship as the rest of his troops, because it was not luxurious enough.
Nowadays, Lord Cardigan is probably best known for three things: one, being a character in the game Assassin’s Creed Syndicate; two, leading the Charge of the Light Brigade, the infamous military disaster during the Crimean War at the Battle of Balaclava. On 25 October 1854: “Into the valley of death rode the 600,” as Alfred Lord Tennyson put it in his poem, and around 160 did not ride out alive; at least another 120 were injured, and the horse death toll was more than 300.
A whole meta-battle waged about whose fault this was: we’ll talk more about Lord Raglan’s own eponymous contributions to knitwear in a bit, but in this instance, he was the commander, he gave commands that made it to Lord Lucan, who passed them on to his brother-in-law Lord Cardigan, whom he hated and who hated him back, and somebody in that chain misinterpreted or misreported what they were supposed to do, and thus the light brigade did something a lot more fatal instead. But Lord Cardigan survived, as did his horse, Ronald.
Afterwards, Lord Cardigan received a promotion, and was celebrated as a military hero. Hence his third claim to fame: having the cardigan named after him, because at the front of a cardigan, two sides meet, like in a duel! No, because people looking to cash in on their freshest military pin-up sold illustrations and stories of how they imagined him on the battlefield, wearing a knitted garment with buttons down the front - sleeveless probably, but by 1864, the newly fashionable ‘cardigan jacket’ had obtained sleeves and entered the lexicon, where it has remained all this time.
Lord Cardigan’s war hero reputation did not last nearly as long. He talked himself up, but others talked him down; he was criticised for turning around on the battlefield and, without checking on how his troops were doing, galloping away from battle onto his yacht, where he ate dinner with champagne. He missed some battles a few days after Balaclava because they were inland and his yacht was not. In 1863 he tried to launch a libel case, to cleanse himself of these smears of cowardice that besmirched his reputation. The case was dismissed, the judgement being that he wasn’t a coward; he was just bad at his job.
So, yeah, that’s how the cardigan got its name: a garment that had already existed for hundreds of years, that may never even have been worn by this man, commemorates the military glory that he didn’t achieve.
HZ: Cardigan's also an eponym, because it's from a Welsh county, Ceredigion, which is literally Ceredig's land, and Ceredig was the landowner in the 5th century.
MIRIAM FELTON: So maybe we don't have to cancel cardigan. Maybe we can just ignore the Earl of Cardigan and call it, you know, from that, from its original.
HZ: If the Earl of Cardigan didn't wear the cardigans, there's plenty of people in Wales that wear cardigans, it's often quite chilly there. They've got a grand tradition of yarn work. So yeah, let them have it.
MIRIAM FELTON: Yeah. And a cardigan is a really useful garment because, you know, you can leave it open, and get cooled down. You can button it up and be warmer.
HZ: Yeah. You can wear it backwards if you must.
MIRIAM FELTON: It's good for layering.
HZ: I have no argument with the cardigan garment itself. I’m wearing one right now! Lord Cardigan’s commander at the Battle of Balaclava, and fellow knitwear eponym, was FitzRoy James Henry Somerset, the First Baron Raglan, and he definitely did wear the raglan sleeve that is named after him - and was active in its invention too. While serving in the British army, Raglan was shot in his right arm at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and had to have it amputated. He wanted to still be able to wield a sword with his left arm, and to dress himself without assistance, so he got his tailor to come up with a sleeve design that allowed him a better range of movement.
MIRIAM FELTON: A traditional set-in sleeve doesn't allow you to raise your arms very far without the sleeve bunching and the whole thing pulling up and showing your belly. But raglan sleeves give you a lot of range of motion in your arms.
HZ: The raglan sleeve is a single piece of cloth from the neck to the cuff, and there's a diagonal seam from the collar to your armpit.
MIRIAM FELTON: Like baseball tees, you know, that have the contrasting-colour sleeves. Makes it really obvious it’s a raglan.
HZ: Lord Raglan did not have time to play baseball though: at the age of 65 he was given his big break and made a general, to lead British troops in the Crimean war.
MIRIAM FELTON: He was the unfortunate commander in chief and made a scapegoat of all sorts of things that happened to the Crimea.
HZ: Lord Raglan got the blame for the troops’ suffering in the harsh winter of 1854-1855, during which they had inadequate clothing and food. His physical and mental health deteriorated rapidly, and he died aged 66 on 28 June 1855.
Knitting to equip the people fighting in the Crimean War made sense, and over in the USA people knitted for Civil War soldiers, so knitting for troops was a practical and patriotic trend in the second half of the 19th century - until the Second Boer War which began in 1899.
MIRIAM FELTON: Everybody was so used to knitting for the troops that they kept knitting during the Boer War. But the Boer War happened in South Africa, and in the veld down there. So they didn't need balaclavas, they didn't need as many socks, they didn't need mufflers, they didn't need knitted belts to keep them warm. There were all sorts of things that people were knitting for the war effort that they actually found strewn across battlefields because nobody wanted to carry them.
HZ: Ah! Oh God.
MIRIAM FELTON: So the knitting effort was still in full force because the women and the people who were left home felt like they didn't have anything that they could do to help. So they were still knitting, even though all these knitted garments were not necessary in the Boer War.
HZ: Oh, so they just thought, "Well, we did it for the Crimea, the Boer War is even further south, so it must be even more cold" - how…?
MIRIAM FELTON: You know, I don't think they thought about it.
HZ: The knitting effort returned for the First World War: British women were knitting sock after sock, as soldiers were suffering from trench foot. The British government distributed official patterns: they didn’t want other knitting patterns going around because they were sometimes used for espionage purposes - knitting is ripe for being used for coded messages, the two stitches knit and purl can be used to write out Morse code and many other ways of encrypting information. Secondly, the government wanted the socks not to have seams that would further irritate the soldiers’ already afflicted feet, so grafting featured strongly in these wartime socks.
Not sure exactly when Kitchener’s name was given to the grafting stitch, but in 1918 Vogue magazine published a pattern for the ‘Kitchener sock’, featuring the stitch - probably to commemorate him, because he died in 1916. But myth persists that Kitchener himself had come up with the sock pattern.
MIRIAM FELTON: No. Kitchener did not invent a sock pattern. I'm sure that the pamphlets that were being written were being written by established knitwear designers for the government, you know, people who would write patterns for the ladies’ journals and all that stuff. I'm sure they just repurposed some of those as patriotic and put them in a patriotic pamphlet and slapped Lord Kitchener's name on them.
Grafting was called grafting before Kitchener, and then it was renamed for Kitchener. For patriotic reasons, is my guess. It's been called Kitchener since then, especially in English-speaking publications. I don't know actually, translation-wise, whether they just call it grafting in other publications?
HZ: Polyglot knitters: get in touch to tell us. Also, Lilly in the Allusioverse Discord said: “I wrote my masters thesis on knitting, including a chapter on knitting for good causes, and I found there was very little evidence that many of the things knit for the troops actually reached them.” Aarghh! Even less reason to have given Kitchener any knitting-related credit.
MIRIAM FELTON: There's a movement to bring back the term grafting - which is actually just more accurate - instead of Kitchener, since Lord Kitchener… that man was very imperialist.
HZ: Kitchener has his defenders and the “He’s just misunderstood!” guys but his brutality in Sudan was even criticised by Queen Victoria and Winston Churchill, and in 1900 Herbert Horatio Kitchener took over command of the British campaign in the Second Boer War, and expanded on his predecessor Lord Roberts’s policies of burning farms, destroying civilian homes, and rounding up people into concentration camps, at least 154,000 - and although the Brits were supposed to be fighting just the Boers, 107,000 of the people incarcerated in the camps were Black Africans. More than 26,000 people are known to have died in the British concentration camps, 80 percent of them children. It was these camps that the term ‘concentration camp’ was first used for, and they were influential upon the Nazis’ development of theirs in the 1930s.
HZ: It’s really hard to spin a concentration camp as a good thing.
MIRIAM FELTON: No, ever. It's never a good thing. And like if you’re burning books, that’s a bad sign.
HZ: He's had a century of having his name on the stitch.
MIRIAM FELTON: Yeah, it's time. Let’s call it.
HZ: The city of Kitchener, Ontario is also named after Lord Kitchener - we’ll get to that imminently.
HZ: How long has the campaign - there's not a formal campaign, but how long has the sort of non-formal campaign to rename the kitchener stitch been going?
MIRIAM FELTON: I believe it's been brought up probably closer to ten years ago, but it hasn't really gained traction until there was this big split in the knitting industry. There was a big drama, shall we say. Ravelry is like a social network for knitters and crocheters and fibre people. There's databases, you can log your projects, all sorts of stuff like that. And then a big split happened.
HZ: Ravelry, like any online community with a million active users a month, has had its problems, such as a redesign in 2020 that caused migraines and epileptic seizures for some users, and many were not pleased by how the founders responded to their concerns. In 2019, Ravelry forbad Trumpist content on the site, stating: “We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy… We are definitely not banning conservative politics. Hate groups and intolerance are different from other types of political positions.” They weren’t banning users, just explicitly pro-Trump posts and patterns such as a ‘Build the wall’ hat, like they had already forbidden confederate flag patterns. It’s disingenuous to act like any community or content provider or social platform has a neutral editorial policy or none at all; but because Ravelry stated theirs outright, things of course kicked off.
MIRIAM FELTON: There was a big split, and a lot of people were trying to boycott Ravelry. I don't think that boycott really went very far, like most boycotts on the right. That's when the big kind of movement took off from what I can see. People started saying, “Look, if we're gonna make knitting woke” - I'm doing air quotes, ‘woke’ - “we should really look at more than just this.”
HZ: Are there any compelling arguments to keeping Kitchener's name on this thing?
MIRIAM FELTON: I have not heard one. When you look at his history, there's not any reason to keep it, especially because the grafting existed before he even was alive. We have evidence in extant pieces in museums that grafting was happening, because the toe of a sock will be continuous, or, you know, that sort of thing. And there's just no reason to keep Kitchener involved. Most of the problems with knitting terminology have come relatively recent in the history of knitting, because knitting has been around for so long that there's been terminology for knitting way longer than there's been imperialists.
HZ: No - there's always been imperialists.
MIRIAM FELTON: No, that’s true, there's always been imperialists!
HZ: My neighbours came round last week, for cheese and dessert. Before they were living in the apartment next to mine, they were living in Kitchener, Ontario. We were talking about the town’s name, and the various campaigns in recent years to change it - so far none of which have had much traction - and one of the neigbours said, “Oh but we shouldn’t rename places, and forget history. We should keep the names, and provide context.” I agree, if we’re keeping eponyms, we should provide context - but, having the eponyms doesn’t necessarily help us remember the history either, as demonstrated by my neighbours and me then spending several minutes trying to remember who the eponymous Kitchener was, aside from the face with the big moustache pointing a finger at you in British army recruitment posters.
Kitchener, Ontario has actually only been called Kitchener since 1916. It has had a few names, since Europeans started putting them on the lands of the Neutral, Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee Peoples. For a while the place was Ebystown, after the Mennonite bishop Benjamin Eby, who had bought a piece of land there in the early 1800s. Then in 1833 it was renamed Berlin, probably because a lot of the inhabitants by then were from Germany.
But after the outbreak of the First World War, the Freedom Fries effect kicked in and German-named things got rebranded - in Britain the german shepherd dogs became Alsatians, and King George V of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha rebranded the royal family the House of Windsor. Over in the US sauerkraut was rebranded ‘liberty cabbage’, dachshunds became ‘liberty pups’ and German measles ‘liberty measles’ (oh come on, that’s just desperate). Kaiser, Saskatchewan was renamed Peebles. In Australia, the Berliner bun was renamed the Kitchener bun. Berlin, Iowa became Lincoln; Berlin, Michigan became Marne; and Berlin, Ontario was renamed Kitchener.
But not just like that, oh no. With some force.
The town held two referendums - the first, in May 1916, decided that they would change the name. You might question the point of a referendum decided by force. Residents - some 75% of whom were German or of German descent - mostly seemed to think the name change was pointless, but if they objected to it they would have been accused of disloyalty. Businesses that did not want this plan had to choose between getting behind it or being boycotted; soldiers prevented opponents from voting. And even with all that, with 3057 votes cast, the referendum only passed by 81 votes.
The second referendum a few weeks later had an even lower turnout - of this town of 15,000 residents, just under 5000 of whom registered voters, only 892 voters turned up to choose the new name for the town, from a widely reviled shortlist that kept changing. 30,000 options had been submitted, a committee whittled them down to a longlist of 113, which included Ontario City (unimaginative!), Newborn, Khaki, Brief, Beaver and Uranus. Sadly none of those made it to the underwhelming shortlists, but while those were being compiled, Lord Kitchener died when his ship hit a German landmine off the coast of Scotland. In tribute, his name was added to the renaming ballot, and he won - by a majority of just eleven votes. 346 for Kitchener; 335 for Brock, named after Isaac Brock, one of Canada’s military heroes; in third place with 23 votes was Adanac - Canada spelled backwards.
Funny how keeping Kitchener’s name, now, when there’s more knowledge of the harms he wrought, rouses far more strong sentiment than there was to give the town his name at the time when people were actually upset by his recent death.
You know which Ontario town is REALLY keen to keep its name? Swastika, Ontario. Managed to hang onto it throughout the Second World War, even tore down signs when Ontario officials tried to change the name to Winston, after Winston Churchill - fair enough, I wouldn’t want to be named after him either. The town is like, “We’re named after a symbol of good luck, and we had the name before Hitler turned up, and why should he get dibs on swastikas?”
So, there are a lot of possible approaches when your town has a name with problematic associations. The township of Russell, Ontario took a cue from King County in the American state of Washington, which in 1986 changed its namesake. It had been named after the 13th vice president of the USA, William R. King, whose family owned 500 enslaved Black people. The county rededicated itself so it is now officially named after Martin Luther King Jr.
Russell, Ontario had been given the name Russell in 1797, after Peter Russell, a British-Irish military man who was one of the new British colony’s early administrators. He had also owned Black slaves, so in 2020 the town announced that it was officially no longer dedicated to Peter Russell; but it would still be called ‘Russell’, because there were so many local businesses that had Russell in their names, and they didn’t all want to change. Instead, the town decided to seek other Russells to be the town’s namesake. In 2022, Russell residents could submit nominations of people who had Russell as a first, middle or last name. Along with their nomination, they had to supply, I quote, “a detailed, well-researched explanation of all positives and negatives about the "Russell" you are nominating, why they are worthy of such an important recognition, and documents to help the special Committee verify the claims in your submission,” and the person submitting also had to commit to having a booth at the Russell Namesake Expo, at which they would explain their choice of Russell to attendees.
I realise that rededicating a town is significant effort, but this is a lot of homework. Perhaps that’s why the Russell Namesake Rededication Committee only received seven suggestions of new Russell namesakes, including two local Russells, Keith Russell and Russell Phair, the philosopher Bertrand Russell, comedian Russell Peters, and the actor Andrew Garfield - Andrew Russell Garfield. The committee had hoped to have more Russells to choose from, so widened the pool of Russells by deciding to be named after ALL Russells. All the good Russells, anyway. “It makes sense to name it after all the Russells who had a positive impact,” said Pierre Leroux, the Mayor of Russell. “So we don't find ourselves in this situation five, ten, twenty years down the road.” (“And to keep that pesky Allusionist off our case!” he did not add.)
An option for Kitchener, Ontario, then, would be to choose a different Kitchener as the town’s namesake. Or if that feels too much like a gamble, dedicate it to whoever is more kitchen.
This podcast is supported by a bunch of very kind listeners who bankroll the show via theallusionist.org/donate and in return receive behind the scenes info about every new episodes, we have livestreams with me and my dictionary collection, and we have regular watchalongs - this month we’ll be watching Muppet Christmas Carol together, and Last Holiday starring Queen Latifah, as well as the festive Pottery Throwdown and Bake Off specials. We also gather in the Allusioverse discord community, where we share portmanteaus - today I saw ‘bunettone’, a mixture of bun and panettone. We have pet pics, we have fancy spoon pics, and we share our craft achievements and advice including knitting. This year I did knit my first raglan-shouldered sweater, before knowing the history, and when I make my next one I’ll think about the eponymous Raglan. Anyway, join us in the Allusioverse and support this pod for just two dollars per month, go to theallusionist.org/donate.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
cachalot, noun: another term for sperm whale.
Origin 18th century, from cachola 'big head'.
Relatable!
Try using ‘cachalot’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. I’m donating the proceeds of this episode to Doctors Without Borders, Direct Relief, Anera, and the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.
The Allusionist music is by Martin Austwick of the podcasts Neutrino Watch and Song By Song. Hear his music at PaleBirdMusic.com.
You heard from Miriam Felton who is a textile and paper artist and designer and she also makes the podcast Yarn Stories. Find her work at miriamfelton.com
Our ad partner is Multitude. Ad spots are now available for 2024. If you want one, and have me talk winningly and affectionally about your product or thing, contact Multitude at multitude.productions/ads.
Find @allusionistshow on the social networks upon which I am. And you can hear or read every episode, find links to more information about the topics and people therein, and see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, all at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
