Church key anecdote

[James C Stalker]

My experience from KY and NC during the 50s and 60s agrees with Wilson's.
Church keys opened beer cans (as well as other cans, like fruit juice cans,
but those were unimportant) before they had pull tabs. The opening was
triangular; the other end often had the rounded crown opener.  In fact,
there were some fairly fancy ones intended to be attached to key chains.
There is an obvious oxymoron here, but I wonder if the triangular shape is
part of the metaphor?

Jim Stalker

Wilson Gray writes:

> On Feb 24, 2005, at 8:02 PM, sagehen wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       sagehen <sagehen at WESTELCOM.COM>
>> Subject:      Re: Church key anecdote
>> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> --------
>>
>>> A few years ago there was a discussion in this cyberspace of "church
>>> key"
>>> as slang for a bottle opener.  I had never heard the word until I
>>> went to
>>> grad school in Wisconsin, where I heard it all the time.  Nonetheless
>>> the
>>> consensus on ads-l seemed to be that it wasn't a regional
>>> expression--a
>>> judgment that seems to be confirmed by its absence from DARE.
>>>
>>> Well, the other night I was at a poker game (which we call "choir
>>> practice"
>>> in the messages we exchange via the college e-mail system in the
>>> process of
>>> organizing a game).  At some point I figured it was time for a beer,
>>> and
>>> finding nothing in the host's kitchen to open it with (and possibly
>>> influenced subconsciously by the fact that this was, after all, choir
>>> practice), I asked him if he had a church key.  My question met with
>>> blank
>>> stares all around--nobody had the slightest idea what I was talking
>>> about.
>>> So this scientific sampling of seven guys demonstrated 100% agreement
>>> that
>>> the expression was unknown in the Northwest.  FWIW, all but one of the
>>> seven are in their 30s, and I think most of them grew up somewhere in
>>> the
>>> NW.  One went to college in Michigan, and I think all the others went
>>> to
>>> Linfield.
>>>
>>> Peter Mc.
>>  ~~~~~~~~~
>> AFAIK, it was a widely-accepted term everywhere I've lived (Midwest,
>> West,
>> Northeast). It only applied to the specialized opener of crown caps, I
>> think.  Not the kind that punches a triangular hole in a can top, or
>> that
>> pries with a little hook.When I was last a beer drinker (had to give
>> it up
>> because of allergy to malt) bottlers were using a kind of crown cap
>> that
>> could be unscrewed.  Maybe the church key has simply become obsolete?
>> A. Murie
>>
>> A&M Murie
>> N. Bangor NY
>> sagehen at westelcom.com
>>
>
> In my lost youth, "church key" referred specifically to the tool that
> punched a triangular hole in a beer can. This was the case in St. Louis
> in the 'Fifties, and 'Sixties. Some models were double-ended, with the
> other end designed to open the crown caps of bottles. The suggestion
> that this tool has been rendered obsolete by pull-tabs and twist-off
> caps makes perfect sense to me.
>
> -Wilson Gray
>



James C. Stalker
Department of English
Michigan State University