Words&Dirt

“It was an ordinary-looking dagger, with a double-sided blade of dull metal about eight inches long, a short crosspiece of the same metal, and a handle of rosewood.  As he looked at it more closely, he saw that the rosewood was inlaid with golden wires, forming a design he didn’t recognize till he turned the knife around and saw an angel, with wings folded.  On the other side was a different angel, with wings upraised.  The wires stood out a little from the surface, giving a firm grip, and as he picked it up he felt that it was light in his hand and strong and beautifully balanced, and that the blade was not dull after all.  In fact, a swirl of cloudy colors seemed to live just under the surface of the metal: bruise purples, sea blues, earth browns, cloud grays, the deep green under heavy-foliaged trees, the clustering shades at the mouth of a tomb as evening falls over a deserted graveyard….If there was such a thing as shadow-colored, it was the blade of the subtle knife.”

––The Subtle Knife, by Philip Pullman, loc. 2386-94

“Conundrums of causality are not just law-school exercises.  On July 1, 1881, President James Garfield was waiting to board a train when Charles J. Guiteau took aim at him with a gun and shot him twice.  Both bullets missed Garfield’s major organs and arteries, but one lodged in the flesh of his back.  The wound was minor by today’s standards and needn’t have been fatal even in Garfield’s day.  But his doctors subjected him to the harebrained medical practices of the time, like probing his wound with their unwashed hands (decades after antisepsis had been discovered) and feeding him through his rectum instead of his mouth.  Garfield lost a hundred pounds as he lingered on his deathbed, succumbing to the effects of starvation and infection eighty days after the shooting.  At his trial, Guiteau repeatedly said, ‘The doctors killed him; I just shot him.’  The jury was unpersuaded, and in 1882 Guiteau was hanged––another man whose fate hinged on the semantics of a verb.”

––The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, by Steven Pinker, pg. 86-7