You can pin fabric items like towels, rags, and clothing together. You can even hang the safety pin on nails and wall hooks to secure items like keys, jewelry, keychains, belts, and hats.

Ordinary safety pins may be safe when closed, but they sometimes fly open and penetrate the flesh of infants whose clothing they fasten. Inventors J. H. Williams of Spokane and Victor Grant Jones ...

and its retaining element (either a torsion pin or a hairpin, also called safety pin). The cable you sometimes see connected to the clip is called a lanyard; it's there so you don't lose the pin ...