We can probably get along quite happily in life not knowing what everything is called.
That is why we have the words ‘doodad’, ‘doohickey’ and ‘thingummy’, but what if you knew what their names were?
1. OK, down to your feet, what is the plastic end bit of a shoelace called? It keeps the end of the shoelace nice and tidy and is called an aglet.
2. But what about the space behind your knee? You have an armpit – could it be a knee-pit? Sadly, no, it is the popliteal region (as opposed to the patella region at the front of the knee).
3. What about the parts of a zipper, what are they called? (I’ll leave it to you to decide which part of the body we’re at now!) Well, when both sides of the zipper are meshed together, it is called a chain. The pull tab is connected to the slider and that is what you grab hold of to open or close the zipper. The top stop and bottom stop are the bits at the end of each side of the zipper to stop the slider from sliding off. And finally, the tape is the fabric part of it all.
4. Right, off the body now and on to writing. What is it called when a main story tells another story inside it? Well, this was used in One Thousand and One Nights and also The Canterbury Tales and is called a frame story.
5. Well, back to the title of this hub and to put your mind at rest, the space between your eyes is the bone that separates the nasal cavity from the brain in your skull and is called the ethmoid bone.
6. And that leads on to whether the space at the end of your nose between your nostrils has a name? It does, and as it is likened to a column, it is called a columella.
7. While we’re in that area, what is the bit between your nose and mouth called? It is actually called the philtrim. Now try to get that into your next conversation!
8. What is the space between your eyebrows called? The name is taken from glabe the Latin for ‘smooth’ (even if you have a unibrow!) and so is called the glabella.
9. Any idea what the spacing is called between written words? Well, deriving from original printing terms, a one character space is called an ‘en’ and if it is a space and a half it is called an ‘em’. These are probably from the amount of space it takes when you type an ‘n’ or ‘m’.
