Cutting Edge

In our busy digital lives, is it time for Splayde revival?

Hybrid cutlery is something that sounds a bit menacing but it’s actually a term to describe the much maligned likes of the Splayde or the Spork. These are single items of cutlery combining more than one function. It’s probably the name that puts people off, the name makes them seem more like a toy than something genuinely useful. They’ve been around for some time yet it seems that this decade could be where they come into their own, if only people knew about them.

Sporks were invented in the US by Samuel Francis in 1874 and have been used in prisons, schools or even restaurants as they are harder to use as weapons apparently. There must be a lot of violent diners over there! The spork looks like a spoon but with fork like prongs and a cutting edge. The similar splayde originated in Australia in 1946 from café owner William McArthur. The purpose of both is you can eat a whole meal with one implement though most people would probably not feel like tucking into a dessert with the same utensil they’d just eaten a dinner with.  Over the years various attempts have been made to market them but somehow they never quite caught on.

Yet now with people spending a huge proportion of their life on their smartphones, these single utensils could come in useful. You could eat a meal and carry on messaging or tweeting, satisfying two vital needs at once.
Perhaps the manufacturers need to rebrand a bit. Neither of the designated names are particularly good especially as they don’t really properly encompass spoon, fork and knife. I’m not even sure why there is Y in Splayde. Perhaps the way to come up with a new name is to write all the relevant letters on a small bits of paper and move them round till you get something that sounds better? This doesn’t help much only giving you names such as Forksneip which sound too much like German instrument of torture. Howsabout using a completely different title which better describes the function such as Meal Shovel? Maybe we’ll just carry on calling it a splayde then.