Church Key

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Morgan calling from Tempe, Arizona.

Hi, Morgan. Welcome to the show.

Hello, Morgan. What’s up?

So about a month ago, I was volunteering, and after we were pulling up barbed wire, we were hanging out and having a couple beers, and someone said, oh, do you have your church key with you? Otherwise, you’re not going to be able to have your beer. And I just had no idea what they were talking about at all. And they said that it was a bottle opener, but I had never heard this term at all before. And it seems like it was a term for an older bottle opener, for a can of beer or something. So I was just calling to ask about the origin of that term.

Yeah, back in the day when, before pop-top cans, before we had aluminum cans, we had steel cans. And you would use a bottle opener with a triangular point to open the beer. And I think you see that sometimes on cartoons and things like that.

Yeah, two triangles, two holes on each side. So you can get air going in and water coming out or liquid coming out.

Yeah. And back in the day, if you’d had enough beers, maybe that bottle opener sort of looked like a church key.

Big and heavy, right?

Yeah.

Kind of the same shape roughly.

Yeah.

So it’s pretty straightforward.

It’s just sort of the resemblance to a very large key.

But it’s irreverent.

There’s something slangy about it, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, it’s kind of a joke if you’re talking about church and beer in the same sentence.

The best we could come up with at the time was that the next morning you were going to be saying,

Oh, God, oh, God.

Well, that too, if you use that church key too often.

Yeah, there’s definitely the slangy mismatch of the idea of church and the idea of sitting around and drinking alcohol, right?

Yeah.

Slaying often has that kind of incompatibility to give you a little bit of irony or humor.

Yeah.

Well, it’s interesting how often that question comes up.

A lot of people are curious about that.

Yeah, but you know, it’s common enough.

It’s in every major American dictionary.

And many of the British dictionaries have it, too, although they usually mark it as an Americanism.

And it might hark back, too, to the days where, you know, you had a really big key to open the front door of a church.

Sure, yeah, like the classic cartoon key.

Yeah.

Do you have any idea about when it started to become a little bit less common among younger folk?

Because most of the volunteers are a lot older than I am.

And none of my friends around my age have used the term at all before.

That’s interesting.

I don’t think it goes back much earlier than the early 1950s, 50s or so.

But then when pull tabs and pop tops appear, the need for the church key diminishes.

However, with the resurgence of beers that aren’t pop tops, a bottle beer like the craft beer movement, maybe the church key slang is coming back.

Because I have certainly heard it from people in their 20s and 30s.

Okay.

Yeah.

That’s cool.

Yeah.

Thanks so much for telling me about this.

Sure thing.

Morgan, thanks for calling.

Really appreciate it.

Bye-bye.

You guys have a great day.

Yeah, you too.

Bye-bye.

One place that you might still use a church key is opening a can of motor oil.

Of course, yeah.

Although many of them now come in bottles with screw tops, plastic bottles with screw tops.

They have the peel back tab that reveals a hole.

Some of them you still use exactly the same kind of implement to make two holes on opposite sides of the can so you can pour the oil out.

Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that.

Boy, that takes me back to being a kid and drinking Hawaiian punch.

Yes, yeah.

One of my favorite things was to use the opener to make triangles all the way around.

All the way around, yeah.

So I could get the lid completely off with these sharp saw-like edges.

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