@CorrectNames: reviving a poetic tradition from a thousand years ago
What do you think ‘house eyes’ are? How about an ‘earth nipple’, or a ‘musical typewriter’? A ‘sleep table’, an ‘upright bed’?
These are just some examples of “the correct names for things” as tweeted by @CorrectNames created by @MarkDempsey_. The examples above are, in order, ‘windows’, ‘mountain’, ‘piano’, ‘bed’ and ‘armchair’.

Some are funny and silly, like ‘limousine dog’ for a Dachshund and ‘Corona cork’ for a slice of lime. But some are intriguing and thought-provoking. They make you think of the object in a new way, from a different angle. That’s why many of these do feel like the ‘correct’ name — they feel even more apt than the original.
News outlets have been clamouring over Mark Dempsey’s Twitter creation recently. Indy100 state boldly that @CorrectNames will “change how you see the world”, while BuzzFeed say the account is “exposing the real names for everyday objects and it’s mindblowing”.
Whether Dempsey knew it or not, what he’s actually doing is reviving a linguistic tradition that was a core part of Old English and Old Norse poetry. Shakespeare spoke Early Modern English, while Chaucer spoke Middle English, so for Old English we’re talking pre-1066, broadly speaking. For Old Norse, we’re talking up to roughly the 15th century. From Beowulf to the Icelandic sagas, poets have been questioning what the correct names for everyday objects are for millennia.
They have a name, too: Kennings. (Or maybe there’s a more ‘correct’ name for them?!) A kenning is a compound word that essentially uses two (or more) words as a metaphor in place of a more concrete noun.
So what correct names would our poetic ancestors have tweeted out, if they had Twitter?
Here are a few examples:
hron-rād — whale-road — the sea (Beowulf 10)
rodores candel — Heaven’s candle/sky-candle — the sun (Beowulf 1571)
heaþoswāta — battle-sweat — blood (Beowulf 1668)
hrafns veðar — raven’s food — corpse (Ingadrápa 1)
heilivágr allra striða — soothing balm of all torments — wine/ale (Hákonarkviða 28)
hadd jarða — earth-hair — grass (Bjarkamál 3)
And there are endless more examples. A ‘floor-steed’ for a bed. A ‘corpse-fjord’ is a grave. A ship is better known as a ‘sea-horse’. At times, the heart is a ‘sorrowful stone of the breast’, hanging limp, weighing us down, while at others it becomes the ‘anvil of joy’, thundering with energy and purpose.
Sometimes ironic, sometimes jovial, sometimes moving. What kennings do is force us to look at an object anew. When we use a word as it’s normally used, we bring to it all our already-held associations with that word. We can try to add to it with adjectives or descriptions, but the associations remain.
When we use a kenning — or when Dempsey gives an object its correct name — we approach the word from the other direction. We are given its associations, its meaning, and then work backwards to figure out what the metaphor is referring to. We think first of whales and how they move along the sea, and then realise that their road is what we know as the sea. We are made to imagine the earth as a person like us and picture its hair before realising that it’s grass and we’re standing on it.
@CorrectNames reminds us of just how fun, evocative and novel kennings can be. We’re forced to see an everyday object that seems utterly dull in an entirely new light. The object takes on new life, linked to other objects, beings, thoughts and feelings in ways we hadn’t considered.
The correct name for anything, then, is whatever feels right, not whatever is most often used.
