RalphinOrmond
Registered
Snorkeling is an exposure to some of the greatest beauty on earth. I've long thought that to have lived and died without having snorkeled in the tropics is to have missed something essential in life. But whenever I talk about it, I stumble over the name, at least in my mind. "Snorkeling" is an ugly word and unworthy of the activity it names. If anyone knows the history of it, how and when the name came to be stuck, like a huge pimple, on the sport, I'd like very much to hear it. My totally uninformed guess is that, a few decades ago, after "SCUBA diving" became part of the vernacular, "Skin diving" was used to describe both freediving and snorkeling and then freedivers became self-conscious as a distinct group and so re-branded themselves. This should have left the name "skin divers" to snorkelers, which would have been great. THAT is a beautiful name. Unfortunately, the weight of its definition involves diving rather than skin, or equipmentlessness, and so now it is being lost altogether. Anyway, at a critical moment in the history of all these names, some one, some group, somehow stuck "snorkeling" onto snorkeling. Does it matter? I think it does. If the name is not cool, the sport will forever be thought uncool. Weird. Oddball. It doesn't add easily onto one's self-definition, one's identity. In contrast, think how happily people describe themselves as skiers, kayakers, hunters, bikers, bicyclists, surfers, and so on. In sum, I think snorkeling needs a new name. If we on this forum could come up with a much, much better name than "snorkeling," (and how hard can that be?) then the effort to gain industry and community acceptance would not be terribly difficult. After all, there is much to be gained by many people if the sport gained wider recognition. My own suggestion, which I readily and gladly admit wont be the magic word, is "swim finning," and the more casual form "finning."