Spinning Fates and the Fate of Spinning: Towards a Nordic Textile Technical Terminology

In the 1930s, two grandes dames of textile research, Agnes Geijer and Margrethe Hald, engaged in a discourse, both private and public, on the correct terms for spinning directions at a time when little or no consensus existed on the matter either in the industry or in academics. The debate is the first evidence of contact between the two scholars, who would go on to become close colleagues and friends — and co-editors of the common Nordic textile vocabulary Nordisk Textilteknisk Terminologi (NTT) alongside Marta Hoffmann and Elisabeth Strömberg. This article revisits this debate that took place at a seminal point in the development of textile technical terminology based on published and unpublished material. The article will show how the two scholars each argued from positions shaped by their unique backgrounds, how the industry and academic terms evolved simultaneously and affected each other as well as the later NTT publications, and how their positions were ultimately joined together by later vocabularies.