The answer is, Yes. They are just doughnuts, but I think they could be so much more.
I was thinking about the name "doughnut" and I realized that the name actually describes quite accurately what the object is. It’s dough that is roughly shaped like a nut. We’re not talking about nuts like almonds and cashews, rather, nuts, the metal fasteners with a hole in the middle for a bolt.
There are some inconsistencies here, though. We accept doughnuts to be round, but one would never see a round fastener nut. Nuts are predominantly hexagonal so that the proper wrench can turn it around the shaft of the bolt. A round nut would be very difficult to grip and, thus, turn. Nuts also have screw threads around the inside of the nut’s central hole to screw onto a bolt. Doughnuts, of course, have no threads around their inner circle.
In some respects, today’s doughnut actually resembles a washer, which is always round and has no screw threads. However washers are flat with wide rings relative to their height and hole size. With these criteria in mind, doughnut is more appropriate than doughwasher.
The other popular doughnut form is the doughnut hole, an mostly inaccurate name. It is based on dough, but it’s not shaped like a nut and it isn’t a hole. (ASIDE: "Hole" is used as the presence of something existent. Example: I made a hold in the front yard. But hole actually refers to the absence of what is around it. Example: I dug out a bunch of dirt from a concentrated location in the front yard. Simply fascinating.)
Now, I understand that "hole" refers to the dough that would fill the hole in a regular doughnut, but I don’t think that’s actually what it is. To make regular doughnuts, I find it highly unlikely that a circular wad of dough is created and then a hole is cut out of its center. Rather, it makes more sense to form dough into a tube and then link the two ends to create a circle.
So called "doughnut holes" are really just "doughballs."
Filled doughnuts suffer from a similar misnomer. There is no hole in the middle as in a nut that fastens something. These are just filled dough.
The metal nut used to fasten is largely useless without its counterpart, the bolt. The screw threads around the inside of the nut’s central hole screw onto a bolt. The pressure placed on the central objects between the nut and bolt head is what fastens the two together.
So after all this discovery, why the nut? Was it really the closest existing shape? For centuries geometry has known the torus, which is exactly the same shape as a doughnut except for tiny imperfections of the dough. My guess is that the inventor of the doughnut was not very science-minded. Rather, he used the name of a shape he understood and one that would make the snack easy to remember and describe for his blue-collar clientele.But if there are doughnuts, why not doughbolts? Or doughwashers, doughnails, doughhammers or anything else found in the average toolbox? The world may never know.
-- Nate Winter
