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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Monday, September 08, 2008

Key facts

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An engineering linguistic trivia point that arose while we were preparing some content from a North American author; In his text he referred to an “Allen wrench” a device known by an assortment of names across Europe but generically, a hex key, the “L”-shaped hexagonal bar used to torque a set-bolt with an internal hexagonal recessed head. How should we refer to it for a pan-European readership? In the UK it’s generally an “Allen key”. (“Allen”, according to the occasionally-accurate Wikipedia, for the original-patent-holder Allen Manufacturing Company of Hartford, Connecticut.) In UK parlance, most devices for applying torque to bolts are “spanners”. “Wrench” is perfectly acceptable, but for the most part is used when referring to an adjustable tool. Almost the only such tool that is described as a “key” is an Allen key…. Which calls to mind the French usage in which the generic term for any device from the family of spanners, wrenches etc. is “un clef” (and, indeed, the tool in question is un clef Allen.)
However, this brought to mind that a late Scottish relative of mine – from an earlier generation of engineers – would also refer to all spanners as “keys”. Which might (or might not) be one more of the various echoes that still exist in colloquial Scots that recall the close connection between that dialect and French, and that had rather different linguistic connections to “English English”.
In EDN Europe? An Allen key, it became. Un clef Allen, en effet.

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