Is it a "bowline" ?

[xarax]

@Dan_Lehman post:4

I’ve long argued against that second criterion, taking the “nipping loop” to be the heart & soul of
a bowline --its defining feature.

However, “long” after you have argued this, “now”, we have the Gleipnir, and we can “see” the landscape of the bowline itself, the Sheepshank and the Captain Mullin s knot from a better angle.
How can we distinguish the mechanism of the bowline from the mechanism of those knots, which also include a nipping loop ?

Let me repeat what I have argued on this issue not so long ago :

@X1 post:5

Without a collar structure, i.e., some U turn of the direct continuation of the returning eye leg, no nipping structure, however strong, would have been able to hold fast. The collar structure enables a large portion of the tensile forces that come through the eye to be “uploaded” on the Standing Part, so the only thing that remains to be done by the nipping structure is to hold the second leg of the collar, the tail - a much easier job. ( The Sheepshank, the Captain Mullin s knot, and the Gleipnir do not have a collar, but they take advantage of the mechanical advantage, and they work effectively because they have more separate nipping loops, arranged the one after the other, or they distribute the tensile forces coming from the eye(s) to more than one segments. )

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@Dan_Lehman post:4

I run into some difficulty in at least two ways in this position:

1. there are constructs that we are happy to regard as parts of bowines that aren’t precisely nipping loops --the water bowline’s clove hitch, e.g.–;
2. some closures of the knot based on that turNip (nipping loop) don’t so well hold it in that form,
   and then one is wondering if indeed a “loop” is there, vs. say a helix (a more obvious helix than the one of a turNip, i.e.).

Well, I do not ! The general concept of the ( topologically equivalent to the unknot ) “nipping structure”, which shrinks and grips and immobilizes the segments of the part of the knot tied after-the-eye, covers all those cases. It is some characterization of the different “collar structures” / of the parts of the knot tied after-the-eye that is missing, which will or will not separate the “Myrtle” and/or the Carrick loop from the rest of the bowlines, not of the “nipping structures” / the parts of the knot tied-before-the-eye.

@Dan_Lehman post:4

Then why are you calling it a “bight”?!
I tend to see such things as “loops”, as they wrap around something more nearly in full circle, vs “turning” in more of a 180deg range.

There is a less geometrical / more functional reason those structures do not seem to be "collars" : In contrast to the collars ( even to the "not-proper" ones, like the collar of the [i]Carrick loop[/i]), they tend to [i]revolve[/i], i.e., move [i]en block[/i] ( like the outer ring sliding on the inner ring of a plain bearing ) and so they run the danger to unwind the coiled (around the rim of the nipping loop) segment, and let their first leg be spilled out of, and their second leg be swallowed into the nipping loop...