Would you be intimidated if someone tried to rob you while wearing a balaclava? What about a ski mask? Trick question: they’re the same thing! The head covering recently made popular in the Pussy Riot protests is known as a balaclava. The name comes from the Port of Balaclava on the Black Sea, an important site in the Crimean War, and the headgear worn there to protect against the bitter cold. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Balaclava”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Lori Garner from Elmira, New York.
Hi, Lori, welcome to the show.
Hello.
I have a question about the word balaclava, which I hope I’m saying right.
I work in a tutoring center at a community college, and our reading students have to read a book called I Am a Messenger, which was written by an Australian and takes place in Australia.
So there’s a couple of different words I’ve run into, you know, like whinging or bloody, that obviously are very kind of British or Australian in nature.
And I got to a section where the main character is attacked by a couple of men wearing balaclavas.
And I looked it up in our dictionary, and it said it was a garment covering the head, neck, and shoulder.
We sounded like a capelet of some kind.
But then it became clear that these things must be covering their faces.
They started asking each other if they had food on them, and then one person started saying that it’s itching his face.
And I really couldn’t figure this out, so I went to Google Images to look it up.
And it turned out that it’s what I would call a C-map.
Mm—
So when I went to look at those Google images, it seems like a majority of the websites were actually American in nature, that they weren’t British or Australian, and yet everybody was calling it the balaclava, but I’ve never heard that before.
And I wondered, is this a common term? Am I missing something?
You know what? I think it’s going to be more and more common because it’s associated with the Russian band Pussy Riot.
Oh, no way!
Yeah, yeah.
In most of their demonstrations that they did, their protests, they wore balaclavas, really bright, colorful ones.
And when people saw that around the world, they started wearing them in solidarity, you know, posting pictures of themselves, you know, saying, I am Pussy Riot, wearing those balaclavas.
And these garments have a really interesting history.
I don’t know if you dug into that.
You know, I thought it was, when I looked it up, there was a picture of a balalaika, and I thought that balaclava with a K was that, and I was obviously wrong.
It’s the name of a port, I guess.
That’s all I learned was that this name comes from the port, but I couldn’t figure out anything about where else it comes from.
Yeah, yeah, it’s really fascinating.
This is the port of balaclava on the Black Sea that was a key site in the Crimean War.
And what happened was that this was one of the first times that soldiers had been mailed knitted headwear to keep them warm in the brutal winter.
And so it’s a nod to the Battle of Balaclava in 1854.
It goes, you know, it goes over the head and over the ears and around the neck.
And, you know, it keeps you a little bit warmer.
Oh, how funny.
I guess what threw me off is that it said it went over the shoulders.
I think that’s where I got confused.
Yeah, there are different kinds.
This is why you get a little bit of the difference between balaclava and ski mask is about a little bit of the difference of the size and the length of these.
Like you have the ones that have eye holes and a mouth hole.
You have one that has a face hole.
You have ones that kind of come over the shoulders.
The ones that are, I don’t know, there’s different sizes and kinds of them.
Okay.
I have a question for you, Lori, though.
Did you find that mostly the term balaclava was used on retail sites?
That’s what it seemed like.
A lot of them were, yeah, stores.
This is one of those places where the specialized language of insiders, people in the retail business, doesn’t necessarily translate to the consumer side of things.
Consumers use one term.
The retailers use another.
But I knew the term balaclava, like you, from my reading because I had the same experience where I’m reading this book about, I think it was even in the Hardy Boys when I was a kid.
Oh, really?
I was like, these bad guys wearing a balaclava.
I’m like, that’s not really good vocabulary for a book for young men.
Okay.
I looked it up.
There it was.
We appreciate your calling, Lori.
Take care now.
Thank you so much.
Bye-bye.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
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As a very young child in the UK in the early 1950’s my mother would knit “Balaclava Helmets” as we called them. They enveloped the whole head except for the face and were long enough to tuck in under the coat collar. They seemed to be pretty standard headgear at the time, although the hoods of ubiquitous “duffle-coats” were taking over. However, the saw me through several of my first English winters.