When a big move has us going through our stuff and deciding what we need to take with us and what we can leave behind, we can sometimes find ourselves forgetting where we even got certain things we have.
Not that most of us can vividly remember the moment that everything we have came into our possession, but it can nonetheless be baffling when we’re surprised to find something in our homes that’s presumably been there for years.
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And as you’ll likely discover if you spend enough time on Reddit’s r/whatisthisthing community, that confusion gets even deeper when people realize they don’t even know what the object in question is.
But fortunately, you’re also sure to find that it rarely takes long before they find out.
As many before them have done, Reddit user Intrepid-Researcher came to the community in search of answers for what kind of golden object they had.
We can see that it’s relatively small from this comparison with a keyring, but the only other things the uploader knew about it were its metallic nature and the fact that it’s heavy with a flat bottom.
Given its size and the flat bottom, one user suggested that this could be a letter holder.
But as they said , the only thing that made them unsure about this guess was the fact that they didn’t know whether it had a hinge.
So as soon as Intrepid-Researcher showed this picture from an alternate angle, it seemed that marked the end of that possibility.
And while another’s guess that this was part of a door knocker seemed plausible enough, a third photo taken from yet another angle seemed to keep the mystery alive.
Given that the flat bottom was covered in red velvet, it seemed more likely that this was made with the intention of placing it on a desk instead of drilling it into a door.
And so it became clear that Intrepid-Researcher likely had a fancy version of a common item on their hands.
However, the hard part would be figuring out exactly which common item that was supposed to be.
Some users thought it looked like a bottle opener but the original uploader figured that it would need a sharper edge to effectively function that way.
With all of these possibilities eliminated, Intrepid-Researcher would end up feeling satisfied with the most common explanation they received at that point.
Namely, that rather than fulfilling a specific function with their design, most of the defining touches we saw on the golden object were just flourishes put on a paperweight.
A fancy, ornate paperweight, sure, but a paperweight.
But soon after the uploader declared the mystery solved, another user cast doubt on this explanation by suggesting it could be a knife rest.
That person explained that given the size of the object, it would have to be a piece of elaborate dinnerware that would hold people’s butter knives.
As they admitted, this would make for an atypical knife rest design because they usually look like the one shown here. Still, it wasn’t impossible.
However, those finals doubts that Intrepid-Researcher didn’t have a paperwieght on their hands were finally put to bed with one detailed response.
Unlike anyone else who examined the paperweight, this person was able to explain that its design was supposed to look like a Chinese sceptre called a ruyi.
Apparently, paperweights like these are often given as gifts to congratulate an achievement or encourage good luck.
Since the original uploader said that the paperweight’s owner was from Singapore — where it’s not uncommon to follow certain Chinese traditions — I think we’ve finally got a fix on what this is and why it looks like that!
h/t: Reddit | Intrepid-Researcher
