One of the things I love dealing with these days is knives, of course I’ve always have but most of my day job hasn’t allowed for me to spend as much time as I’d like. But the world of knives is a great analogy to the world at large and even individuals in general. There’s a knife for every job and task that makes the world turn. Some knives can do many things, others are absolutely specialized for one task, and some unfortunately can do almost nothing.
I have strange tastes, I like high end knives, durable low cost knives, and mid grade knives. Pretty much if it’s functional, I like it. Because my interests vary so widely in the knife world I look around at the mainstream and the obscure for as many options as possible. This leads me to find different trends and option. It’s really weird to find just how much different concepts and styles make their way around.
There are two things I’d like to look at. How much the cool factor can really ruin something and how experience driven designs will make their rounds and resurface even if they go out of mainstream style.
There are a lot of popular online games that feature knives as a melee weapon. They come in all shapes and sizes and some really god-awful color patterns. But what is worse is that they popularize very useless designs and those designs flood the market with replicas of them. Now the problem with this is not that people want to buy this cool knife, the problem is that individual thinks that cool knife design is a practical and extremely functional tool. Some are very similar to long lived knife designs, others are a weird amalgamation that would end up hampering the user more than help them.
It is not a good plan to use a tool that makes your job harder rather than easier. That’s why a lot of the older designs are the way they are. Up until recently it was considered perfectly normal for an individual to carry a cutting tool with them, even just 100 years ago it was a way of life. If we extend to 200 or even 1000 years ago we find that the farther back one goes the more likely you are to find the general populace have some form of knife in their possession, location dependent.
In these formative years, knives were essential tools and their designs reflected that purpose and we still have a number of those designs with us today. There are even subgroups of people who try to recreate these designs to understand them better.
This doesn’t mean people won’t try new designs and try to improve upon older ones but sometimes the cool factor comes in and the design is corrupted by its influence. The now corrupted design then becomes popular because a particular maker produces it or they market it beautifully. Functionality may be sacrificed for the cool factor, or the cool factor of a system will cause the functionality of a design to be sacrificed to adhere to that “Ideal of cool”. This results in the precedence of tried and true designs to be ignored.
This isn’t saying that experimentation is bad, it needs to be done, but the design needs to be kept in its context. Some knives are design for bushcrafting, cooking, general purpose, fighting, or even as an everything knife. Once they are taken out of their contexts they begin to fail. It’s very similar to how MMA tends to boil down various martial arts to their basic most functional techniques. The flash and flair of some systems and their training methods dazzle people and they want to try it, but put into a competitive environment the poorer techniques die off leaving only the best (the most effective) techniques.
The same happens in the knife world to an extent and it’s interesting to see designs develop in two different areas and eventually meet. I have a perfect example of this. There are a lot of dagger designs in existence. Two edges and a point of some type in the modern sense. I recently got a letter opener because I wanted to explore its capabilities, and I was surprised to find ti fit two to three different systems of thought in the “knife fighting world”. The letter opener itself is nothing special, stainless steel, china produced, plastic handle scales, and just longer than my hand. But the research and experience that I have with blades reveals about four overall concepts in play.
Let’s start with the overall shape and the handle. Overall the narrow ice-pick like blade is very similar to heel daggers and a few other sneaky spy weapons developed and used by the OSS (precursor to the modern CIA) back in WWII. It’s a little narrower but the overall shape is very similar. Moving on to the handle, the letter opener is balanced in such a way that it can rest very easily in a pinched grip between the first finger and thumb. This is the same desired grip and balance that Fairbairn-Sykes daggers aimed for, although on a smaller scale and without a guard.
Moving on to the blade, I found the edges were what could be called a splitting edge, not really designed to cut all that well but then its purpose is to burst through paper, which it does well. What is actually interesting is tip and cross section of the blade. The cross section is diamond shaped, a type used in a large variety of swords and daggers, especially that of the Fairbairn-Sykes style. The tip itself is strangely asymmetrical to the point that it has no actual tip, just this strange squared off chisel like end. This end is very similar to what is known as a Beshara Wedge or Besh-Wedge. The Besh-Wedge was a modern attempt to reinforce the weak point of a lot of dagger designs which was the tip. Taking from some Japanese designs the blade’s cross section looks like a parallelogram and its tip is a chisel point, almost exactly like this randomly purchased letter opener.
Good designs and ideas will always find a way to survive longer and better than bad ideas. While the bad ideas may become the mainstream, the good ones will be waiting in the wings to come in and clean up when they fail.
If your ideas and methods are good, they will endure. If they are not they’ll just crumple and you will only be out of a bad idea and however much you invested in it. But it won’t destroy you, it will just have removed the bits that were making you weaker.
Think about it.
Sincerely,
The Irreverent Gentleman
gentlemansuniversityofmanliness 