Plato asked, Why is a chair a chair? What makes a chair not a table, or a table not a chair? Is a stool just a tiny table, or a small chair without a back-rest? It seems like an academic question, or a matter of nomenclature and categorization. But it can be poetic: Was my mother’s lap a chair when I was a toddler? Are my thighs and groin my lover’s chair in certain circumstances?
Some chairs seem more important to name and think about than others. Domestically, one thinks of the highchair where Baby first learns to sit and eat and make a mess. Or Dad’s favorite chair, that Lay-Z-Boy recliner with cat-shredded arms set firmly in front of the TV. In public, there’s the park bench or bus stop bench—a slight variation on Plato’s ideal form—a chair you share with a few others. At the airport, the seating is only chairs—rows of them with intractable armrests, specially designed to prevent lounging and slovenliness in the form of leaning back or lying over.
At one East Coast Ivy League university there exists another kind of specially designed chair. Actually, there are many of them and they exist to solve a problem, real or perceived. The chairs are regular desk chairs that go in dorm rooms, except that they are made to be unstable. Not unstable enough to tip over while sitting at the desk, but enough so that if a super stressed-out student tries to stand on the chair in order to loop a wound-up sheet in the form of a noose around the ceiling fan, the student would fail. The chair would tip before tension mounts. Across campus these chairs are known as “wobbly chairs.”
If there’s a chair to prevent death, there’s also one to facilitate it: the electric chair. One of the most infamous is “Gruesome Gertie,” so named by death row inmates at Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary. This chair, hardwood and fastened with leather restraining straps, looks as if it were transported from a medieval dungeon. In fact, Gertie is well-travelled: in the course of 50 years (1941-91) it was moved from parish to parish to execute 87 humans. It wasn’t, however, the only chair of its kind to get a nickname; others have been variously called Old Smokey, Old Sparky, and Yellow Mama.
The names we have given chairs, in this case an object for government–sponsored homicide, affect the way we perceive them. Are “Old Smokey” and “Old Sparky” supposed to be cute monikers, somehow downplaying their functional horror? Does “Yellow Mama” invoke some kind of return or appeal to origins?
One could say, as the poet Gertrude Stein did, that a rose is a rose is a rose. But one can’t say the same for a chair. In the former, language takes on a life of its own; hence the rose seems to rise: “arose.” In the latter, there’s no such wordplay. A chair is always a chair.
Illustrated by Lara Schaberg
Mark Yakich is the author of the Object Lessons book Football (2022)
