We sure are strange sometimes. Most of the time, we make sense. We’re “sensible” and we do things for a reason. But there are times when we do things that make no sense at all, and we don’t care.
Just take pocketknives, for instance. Most men wouldn’t leave the house without one. I sure wouldn’t. In fact, I’ll bet if you stopped 10 men in business suits on the sidewalk in New York City or London and asked them to turn their pockets out for you, at least eight of them would be carrying a pocketknife. And one of them would be bound to call the police because of your weird request.
Why is this, do you suppose? If you asked each of them, you’d get a heming and hawing and they’d probably say they need it for sharpening pencils. Of course, they don’t “use” pencils any more, and if they did, there’d be an electric sharpener to bring them to a point.
But the bottom-line truth is, we aren’t sure just why we feel naked without a little, dull, old pocket knife on us. The truth goes back before history, before human speech, before microwave ovens. We have that stupid little knife on us because with it, we’re armed. Yes. We carry one because men have always carried some kind of sharp object for protection. It might have been an obsidian knife, a steel rapier, an Italian dagger, a Scottish skean dhu, but it was on us, because we felt more secure with it.
Men with sharp objects survived to sire other men who carried sharp objects, so that’s why, a million years later, we have that dumb little pocket knife with us that couldn’t spread Cheez Whiz on a cracker.
But don’t leave that thing home, because without it, you’d be helpless against the world.
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Brought to you by readers of my next book, “Cock-a-Doodle Death.” Both of them.