What's That Humpy Thing On Your Back?
Introduction to what a backpack is.
– Start. –
Here is A Quick Introduction To What A Backpack Is. I say this so that you won't be frightened by finding a quick introduction to what a backpack is in a chapter that is named A quick introduction to what a backpack is. Or surprised not to find directions for replacing the roller bearings in the camshaft of your D9 Caterpillar.
So, ready, then?
Here goes.
Being contrary, I'll start small, with pack, and tell you what I don't mean.
After that we'll see if we can express what we do mean when we say pack and then sneak up on backpack, and then finish off with a definitive description of the sucker (i.e., The Backpack).
Ready?
– Don't Think This. –
As we mean it here pack is not a cream that cleanses and tones the skin. Not for us manly men. You may be different, but I have skin, and so far it has frequently come in handy, but I don't get fancy with it. I wear it around during the day, wash it once in a while (no bleach, no iron, tumble dry on low) and don't futz it with creams, cleansers or toners. No one has complained yet, at anything above a whisper. To my face.
I'm also not thinking of pack as meaning to compress into a wad. We're really looking more for nouns than verbs here anyway.
This leaves out the old, honorable and peculiar Washington State definition of carry, as carrying something on one's back: "Pack them chickens out to the barn, Ma, and we'll give 'em each a whack on the neck with that there hatchet afore we stew 'em." It does make a person drool a bit though. I have to admit that. Can I lick the hatchet when you're done, Pa?
A pack is also not a number of things, as it is sometimes in other contexts.
Not a battalion.
Not some large quantity or other indefinite number of anything ranging around and getting into trouble. This might be clearer if you think of a pack of rats for example, as in some number of rats in a loose, self-organizing association, swarming the landscape.
Not that.
Try also not to think of a rack of Pats, or of Patricias. Do not form an image of a troupe of tapeworms or a flying swarm of Sunday-school teachers. We don't mean pack in that sense.
Maybe that last one isn't quite appropriate. Where I come from they're never referred to by the word swarm. They're always packs. Some enterprising souls even trap them commercially using nets, in winter, when their fur is thickest. The Sunday-school teachers I mean.
Tapeworms don't have any fur to speak of that I've ever noticed, though some of them are more cuddly, in my experience, than most Sunday-school teachers I have met.
– No Verbs Allowed. –
Since we're not talking verbs we can't say that pack means to unfairly weight, as in packing a jury. Not that we'd do that sort of thing, unless in great need, but still.
We would never consider packing an umbrella for safety, not even to a lawn bowling tournament, much less packing a six-shooter, unless it was a very special kind of lawn bowling tournament and required a judicious choice of armament.
A pack isn't a gang ("Police today broke up a notorious pack of investment bankers that have been infesting that big shiny building down on Main Street.")
No.
A pack is not a group of hunting animals either. Not for us. Think packs of carnivorous bunnies. Not them, not any of them. Let's move on.
A pack is not a collection of things. Whoever said that is nuts. That doesn't even make sense. That's the last time I ever look up anything on the internet.
A pack is not a container or parcel, or a package containing playing cards or cigarettes or tiny lozenges of chilled lard. Not as we mean it. Not even close.
A pack is not a throng pressed tightly together, or what a throng can be said to be doing as it compresses. We are completely uninterested in whatever it is that throngs may be getting up to these days, either in public or in private. We are innocent parties and try to mind our own business and wish that more of you all would do the same, especially when it comes to that thronging and compressing.
A pack ain't a clique. It ain't an exclusive circle of people. Anyway, as a hint, we'll say that packs are used more often to include than to exclude. Remember, that's only a hint now - you'll get more info a bit later so don't get all tingly just yet.
Pack the faucet is a good one, and you may say it every now and then, out of habit if you've been brought up by plumbers. But you'd be wrong to do so in this context. Not here, not now, as they say. We don't want you to carry a faucet or to cram packing material into it.
Do they even do that sort of thing any more? We don't care, so let's drop it right now. Get modern already.
Now when we get to pack in the sense of a blanket that may be either wet or dry, or a sheet that may be either dry or wet, and think of wrapping it therapeutically around someone's body, especially someone pretty yummy, or even sometimes not quite yummy but sort of OK, someone who will do in a pinch, are we using the word pack in anything like an appropriate sense, as related, say, to backpacking?
No.
Masses of frozen sea ice? No.
Storing data in a compact and compressed form? No.
Does the Scrum template work with the latest Visual Studio service pack? No. Not for us.
What the Federal Aviation Administration means when it refers to a parachute that includes everything (canopy, container, pilot chute, connector links, suspension lines, risers) but not the harness? No, and what are they up to with that? Are these adults at work here? No harness? The FAA? Do they operate with our tax money?
OK, nuff foolin. Pay attention.
Now.
– Think humps. The good kind. –
A pack is an artificial, hollow hump that straps onto your body.
So you can cram stuff inside it and wear it to walk around and look cool and all.
The idea is to pack (or shove) things inside (into) a (the) pack (the hollow humpy thing) until it is full of stuff, and then keep on doing that for a while until you are right on the verge of a rip roaring explosion, and then do a little more to tempt fate and prove how strong your forearms are, and then cinch it shut tight and put the whole thing on your body and walk around.
Packs are really best for people who have always wanted to be old codgers but who couldn't wait to superannuate and grow that bony hump. And packs are kind of neat because with a pack, see, you put it on, and then later you take it off again and fake being normal whenever you want to, even if you actually feel better and look more natural with a hump.
Now the special sort of pack we're talking about here is a backpack.
We call them backpacks because these are packs that get strapped only onto the back, which is the right place to simulate the most common sort of hump. Humps look more settled on a person's back, more humpy, and don't get tangled up in stray body parts the way they would if we wore them around our knees, or over our faces, or maybe inside our pants.
Those others would be your knee packs, your face packs, and your codpieces. But not your backpacks. Nope!
There were codpieces once upon a time. Once upon a time men did have this other kind of pack. Not kneepacks or facepacks. Or trouser packs exactly, but there was a pack that went with pants. Such packs were in fact called codpieces, and they went on the front, down low, somewhere below the belt. (Let's make it into a game and see if you can guess exactly where.) They (the codpieces) could have been used for ballast but were mostly decorative for most of their history.
Lest they overbalance the wearer codpieces were kept on the small side, relatively speaking. Normally they were well under the 80 liter mark that so many modern packs reach, and were never advertised as expedition-size. Most often these codpieces were used to carry softer more delicate personal items that might be susceptible to cold breezes and the occasional stray nippy dog, but codpieces were also pressed into service as coin and snuff holders. (This is documented in the history books, folks!)
But mostly codpieces were fashion statements. The male kind of fashion statement.
Guys.
Go figure.
Surprised yet?
I didn't think so.
Although it looks like codpieces enlarged as time went by (as car engines have been known to do each time the model year ticks over), they remained mainly decorative though some later and larger specimens may have been handy for carrying weapons or snacks. This ranks the late codpiece as an early cousin of today's smallest fanny pack, worn backward, over the abdomen, and far too low.
But let's say you aren't especially interested in carrying a pen knife, a few coins, a bus pass, and a sandwich in your crotch purse, or in stepping into a doublet and tights for a fun day of intrigue at the royal court. Let's say you might want to go hiking, and stay out overnight, and not have people point at you and make disrespectful or even hurtful remarks.
That's when you ditch the codpiece and grab the backpack.
Having left the middle ages behind, we are nowadays more utilitarian and tend to hike and sleep and watch TV a lot more than we go to war on horseback, get shot full of arrows, poked by swords, or burned at the stake for heresy. So these days the modern pack has really come into its own.
OK, we've got the humpy part down. Hump = pack.
And the hump-on-the-back part, which turns our ordinary humpy pack into a true backpack.
So what's the deal then?
– Suction? Will that work? No. –
Well, backpack is a flexible term. To keep a pack on your back you need some way to hold it there, to fasten it in place so it remains a back pack.
Suction cups and metal hooks will do it, but they have downsides. Bolts are out too. And nails. Glue is messy and unreliable, maybe even toxic. Wire takes you back to the metal hook side of the fence, and twine is scratchy and you have to keep tying it and retying it all day.
So our distant ancestors developed the idea of the strap.
A strap is a flexible band that attaches to the pack at two points, forming a loop. We put our arms through these loops and settle the pack onto the back, with the weight resting on our shoulders. These simple loops have now become shoulder straps. Believe it or not though, shoulder straps predate the backpack itself.
No, this is not a joke based on the gownless evening strap, though that is still an interesting idea. Interesting to some.
Shoulder straps were first developed centuries ago when what would become the backpack was still worn on the front of the body. It was, in effect, a frontpack. In the same way that the codpiece (Middle English: cod + pece) was a piece that held the cod (the bag as male anatomy was referred to then), the frontpack, frontisepack, or frontispak (Latin: front + Middle Low Flemish: humpy thing) was a pack that hung on the front of the body where it obscured vision, interfered with balance, and caused the wearer to stumble around and bump into things while looking humpy but also looking, unfortunately, severely odd.
But that was acceptable if you were one of the expendables and it was wartime. You were fitted with a frontispack, had it loaded with rocks, and were sent out to deal with the enemy whenever your overlord experienced a fit of aggression and didn't mind sacrificing a few hundred nonentities like you.
The method was to reach into your conveniently-located front pack, pull out a rock or two and heave them at the enemy.
When the battle got hot, heavy, and close, you would engage in pack-to-pack combat by running at your opponent and ramming him with your stone-laden front-hump. And in fact this is where we get the term humping though over the centuries its meaning has mutated and moved toward the private end of the lexicon.
Today that word (humping) still refers to something dangerous, occasionally rude (not to mention messy), but only partly warlike, and typically shorter in duration than the Hundred Years' War. Usually now (though not always) not referring to two large, hairy, smelly, noisy, and aggressive men having at each other with extreme nastiness at close range.
Since all the best things emerge slowly through painful trial and error it took several hundred years for the frontispack to evolve into the backpack and become an accouterment of peaceable recreation.
No one can say for certain if the frontispack crept up over the head and shoulders and then downward to reach the back, or if it slithered first down between the legs and then up the backside, or if it split into to two parts, one part migrating under each arm to then coalesce at the back again, but it seems to have happened suddenly one day, perhaps at the beginning of hiking season, on a warm afternoon late in June of one very special year that is lost in the mists of history.
No one is certain.
But it could have happened that way, couldn't it?
Go ahead, admit that you want it to be true.
– Back to the codpiece. –
Although the actual codpiece as a component of male attire slowly faded entirely from the fashion catalog of history over the course of the last 500 years, its basic utility (which it shares with all packs), never vanished entirely from the human subconscious.
First, in recent years, small fanny packs caught on, and proved handy for stashing doughnuts, toting wallets, hauling cell phones, secreting spare change, tucking hankies, stowing pocket cameras, gloves and so on.
Second, these packs began rotating from back to front, some clockwise, some counter-clockwise, but coming to rest at the front of the body as a sort of zippered codflap over the wearer's whodunnit region.
So now we have not a protruding milepost of male vanity but a convenient way for dorks and the elderly to carry their doodads.
So there you are. Great story ain't it?
Of course it's true. It should be true, and therefore it is true.