This morning Kalleh and I had our usual Saturday-morning coffee with bagels, the coffee in paper cups which would have been uncomfortably hot to the hand. Double-cupping would insulated the hands but double the establishment's cost-for cups. Instead, the establishment provided ring-shaped pieces of cardboard into which you could slip each cup, and our fingers would hold the rings rather than the cups themselves.

What do you call those cardboard thing-a-ma-bobs? We asked six people, including ourselves, and came up with three "I don't knows," one "sleeve", one "jacket," and one "clutch" -- but the last is a tradename for the particular brand of thing-a-ma-bobs.

What do you call it?
If the thing is unnamed, may I propose that we proselytize for zarf?

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We asked six people

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What he means is that Shufitz asked 6 people!

Morgan, having met Shufitz recently, I think you might agree that he gets the prize for reaching out to more strangers than anyone else you know. Hmmmm, I wonder if there is a word for that!

[This message was edited by Kalleh on Sat Jul 5th, 2003 at 18:41.]

Hmmmm, I wonder
if there is a word for that!
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Gregarious, of course. As for the insulating sleeve, that's what I've always heard it called.

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Originally posted by Asa Lovejoy:
As for the insulating sleeve, that's what I've always heard it called.

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Yes, but insulating sleeve is a description of the item, not a word naming it. Rather like describing someone as a "male child", rather than using the word "boy".

And its too broad a description, for it encompasses to far more items. If you google "insulating sleeve" you get approximately 2290 hits, of which only 69 pertain to "insulating sleeve" coffee.

To me, the very fact that we're compelled to resort to multi-word descriptions indicates that we don't yet have a viable word to name this common, familiar object.

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What he means is that Shufitz asked 6 people!

Morgan, having met Shufitz recently, I think you might agree that he gets the prize for reaching out to more strangers than anyone else you know.

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Rolling and laughing here Kalleh! That is him, for sure! He certainly is not shy!

I saw the word "zarf" in a piece of writing dealing with common everyday objects that have names which most people are unfamiliar with. I believe it was in one of the "Book of Lists" series. Along similar lines, the hard part at the end of a shoelace is an "aglet" and a 64th note is a "hemidemisemiquaver."

(By way of a sidenote, some 30 years ago I wrote a song entitled "Hemidemisemiquavers" as part of a Music Appreciation class I attended. It had to do with advice given to terminally ill songwriters, suggesting they might want to compose peppy little numbers instead of long drawn-out dirges seeing as how their own time was increasingly limited. As of this writing, Britney Spears has expressed zero interest.)

As of this writing, Britney Spears has expressed zero
interest.)
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I hope you have the good taste to reciprocate.