Page 48 - The Pocket Guide to Outdoor Knots

Knot names

A few knots are nameless—and, since anything without a name is innominate, I
call these orphans “innominknots”—but most have a name. Some are

descriptive, such as the figure of eight knot (pages 54–55); some imply a person

or place of origin, like Ashley’s stopper knot (pages 28–29) or Alpine butterfly
(page 109); others suggest the primary use or function, the angler’s loop (pages

26–27) for example; and a few are enigmatic or whimsical, such as the vice
versa (pages 138–139) and knute hitch.

Although most knots fall into discrete categories, their family relationships
can be hard for an outsider to discern, while some maverick individual knots can

be downright misleading. The fisherman’s knot is mostly used as a bend; and,
due to a semantic quirk by which sailors always spoke of “bending” a line to

ring or spar, the fisherman’s bend is actually a hitch. The reef knot has been
called a flat knot, and is widely known in the USA as the square knot, which

makes it necessary to find an American alternative (rustler’s knot is one) for the
other knot that the British call a square knot.

Several knots have more than one name. The double fisherman’s knot (page
51) is called the grinner knot by anglers, and the weaver’s knot is just another

sheet bend. It was this muddled knotting nomenclature that caused Desmond
Mandeville, a founder-member of the International Guild of Knot Tyers, to end a

poem in which he exhorted inventive knot tyers to name their new knots with the
wry conclusion:

But worse than those that have not any,

Some knots there be that have too many.

Knot strength

In the days of vegetable cordage, when a rope broke under load it was often

observed to do so close to the knot and it was deduced that knots somehow
weakened the lines in which they were tied. For instance, the simple overhand
knot (page 24) reduces the breaking strength of an unknotted rope by more than