I defer further comment on the square knot to Mors Kochanski's opinion. Personally, inspite of owning the obligatory paracord, I have a unwrapped coil of vintage, genuine, philipine Manila that left the decommissioned cutter Minnetonka on a midwatch in 1977 for my own BOB. And as the Dean of horsepacking writers, Joe Back wrote " when you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on." I learned the comparative morallity of knots on Tillamook Bay in 1975. A winter flood sent a drowned cow floating out in the bay. Harbour Master Benny Larsen(y) decided it was a hazard to navigation ( and tourism.) So I had to go tow it in with my beloved MLB 36535. My CPO wouldn't let me take my rifle out and just bang a few .375 open sea cocks into it. So we took it in an alongside tow with four lines secured to the four now rigid legs. I got it to the harbour and tied it off to an unused slip, figuring the dairy was now responisble. Old Benny howled at my CPO about the slips being reserved for registered vessels. So I went down with some spraypaint and gave the cow some numbers and a license sticker on one hoove. No go! and I had to winch the cow into the back of the station utility truck. By now the cow was riper than Tillamook Cheese, which I still abhor, and as an aside a reason I never bought any Martindales from Cutsforth in that same local. I was pretty fed up, and tossed some old manila from the bosun's locker over the corpse and tied off with some granny knots. It really stank and I wasn't in the mood to do McNamara's lace or any other fancy work. I was going down the PCH for the city dump, wishing it was the stretch at Malibu instead when everything gave way. I heard a loud bump-splat! and pulled over a safe and sane 300 meters down the road in the dense fog. I could hear J brakes and see the lights of a big Peterbuilt logging truck hit the deceased. Soon after one of the two city sherrifs of Garibaldi rolled up, the ex navy one who hated coasties. He was in a real fix, should he cite the driver and irritate that big Oregon extractive industry, or trace the cow and cite the owner of that one? He wavered, and waved the truck on and retrieved a now bloody and putrescent head with plastic ear tag extant and placed it into a evidence bag.The rest of the cow soon vanished into seagull gullets, racoons and transients thumbing down the yellowbrick road to the Emerald City ( L.A.)I slowly slipped back unseen to my base like a Unterzeeboot Kapitain of old, resolved to learn the Trucker's hitch. I never really did, somebody invented and marketed ratcheting tie downs soon after. So, the moral is: If you decide to use sqaure knots, don't have a cow.